From cotton clothes to oversized tees: Diksha Dhami talks about summer fashion
Actress Diksha Dhami, who plays the lead role of Chaina in 'Badi Haveli Ki Chhoti Thakurain', has talked about her what she loves wearing during the summer time and it includes lots of cotton clothes, oversized T-shirt and baggy jeans.
'I love wearing clothes that truly feel like me — stylish, and fun. I've even organised my wardrobe according to the seasons. Since it's summer right now, I prefer cotton clothes, oversised tees, and baggy jeans,' Diksha said.
She added: 'They're easy to wear, breathable, and just perfect for the heat. But when it's time to dress up, I go all out in traditional wear. There's something really special and magical about wearing Indian outfits, especially during festivals and special occasions.'
Speaking about fashion and style, she said: 'I've come a long way. From wearing simple kurtis in college to slowly creating my own unique style, it's been quite a journey. Initially, I wasn't too into fashion, but ever since I entered the acting world, I've started experimenting with different looks — and I truly love it.'
'For me, fashion has become a way to express confidence. I even have my own style mantra: wear what makes you feel good and comfortable, and don't be afraid to mix things up. Don't just follow trends — create your own.'
Diksha also shared her love for her character's outfit: 'I adore the Rajasthani look I have in my current show. The vibrant colours, the maang tikka, and those pretty juttis make me feel so royal. I'd love to take a few of those pieces home with me!'
'Badi Haveli Ki Chhoti Thakurain' will air on Shemaroo Umang. The show follows Chaina, a skilled puppeteer from Jaipur, who is shaped by tragedy after her mother's disappearance and her father's imprisonment.
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'Mudh mudh ke na dekh' (Don't look back), Maya sings to Raj. You can faintly hear Kapoor's cinema whisper in your ears: can you be both ambitious and innocent? Can you optimise for profits and love? In 1948, at the spindly age of 24, Raj Kapoor not only began his own banner, RK Films, but also made his directorial debut, Aag. At that time he was known as 'Raju' the hustler about town or 'the elder son of Prithviraj' the towering theatre personality of Mumbai. The arc of Kapoor's five-decade career, his becoming the Showman of Hindi Cinema, was an act of retrieving himself from his father's shadow, a theme that keeps rising in his films until youth itself becomes synonymous with the shrugging off of received legacy. In Aag, Kewal (Raj Kapoor) leaves his family tradition of lawyers, to become a stage actor. In Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985), his last film, Naren (Rajiv Kapoor, Raj Kapoor's youngest son) leaves his industrialist father to go 'kahin door', somewhere far off, by the banks of the Ganga, with his lover and their child. Here, I must caution a difference between innocence and naivete. If to be innocent is to be unblemished by the world, to be naive is to not know blemish, to be ignorant of it. The broad arc in Raj Kapoor's cinema can be seen as the movement from the innocent male to the naive one. This might be because as Kapoor's filmography ages, his actors—his sons Rishi Kapoor and Rajiv Kapoor, and his brother Shashi Kapoor—look embryonic, smooth-skinned, wide-eyed, without facial hair. The first time they see a beautiful woman in the film feels like the first time they have ever seen beauty. The first time they hear a beautiful song, their response is pronounced with heightened, dopey feeling, as though they have discovered melody. The face of Raj Kapoor, after all, looked touched by life—he had a moustache. These faces look touched up, air-dropped. But I also suspect this male naivete has a lot to do with how desire was shown in these later movies, whispers from Mera Naam Joker (1970) and Bobby (1973), expressing itself most egregiously in his final three films, Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978), Prem Rog (1982), and Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985), where women withered as suffering symbols of sexed tradition, who yearn to be cast out and punished, losing their sense of self at the feet of their lover. In the 1950s, working exclusively with Nargis, the imagery of women in Kapoor's films was saree-clad virtue. Whether they were poor in Shree 420 or rich in Awara, there was no scope for moral dithering or erotic fixation. Even when Nargis wore a swimsuit in Awara—shot indoors in a set constructed on Nargis' demand, for she refused to be outdoors in a swimsuit—Rachel Dwyer notes, 'the close up [is] of her face with her hair blowing in the wind, not one of her body.' Enter voyeurism But soon, with Nargis' exit from Kapoor's oeuvre, a voyeurism enters Kapoor's cinema. Although Vyjayantimala's scene in a swimsuit in Sangam (1964) only came after much cajoling, Kapoor seems disturbingly fixated on the idea of the exposed female body. In Bobby and Mera Naam Joker, these were used to fuel the men's first brush of desire—'pandrah-solah baras vala pyaar', the love of an adolescent, basically a hormonal surge. But from Mera Naam Joker onwards, these sexualised female bodies performed by freshly minted actresses could not muster what Michael Newton calls Nargis' 'spontaneity of feeling'. And a stilted, staged, sexed presence begins to permeate these films. The women became forcefully buxom, and the chemistry between the lovers refuses to see it as erotic, only romantic. If only the writing were as frank as the wardrobe. Why is there this chasm between what we are seeing and what we are hearing? Raj Kapoor still wanted to hold onto the mantle of tradition even as he called himself a 'bosom man' in a conversation with the writer Khushwant Singh. The woman became the site of pavitrata (purity) for the people on screen and the object of lust for us off-screen—he wanted it both ways. What is this purity he is after, an idea that is itself tainted by generations of de-sexualising women? Besides, these women do not seem aware of themselves as sexualised objects, for there is an abandon that comes with self-knowledge that these women lack. The erotics is for us, the audience, to salivate over. Also Read | Awara and the Constitutional question When Zeenat Aman writes about the furore around Satyam Shivam Sundaram where she walks about wrapped in a white cloth or in tight low-cut blouses—'I was always quite amused by the accusations of obscenity as I did not and do not find anything obscene about the human body'—she is responding to the image in isolation. The human body is a site of desire. But when it is hollowed solely into a site of desire, that is uncomfortable to watch, like watching a shapely mannequin being eroticised. How do you respond to these women, over-sexed traditionalists who will caress the shivling with their face in an act of devotion, come to pujas in bursting blouses, shower under waterfalls in white wraparounds, are constantly burned, assaulted, raped, thrown into brothels? It turns the men into saviours who turn their backs on their families and their future to hold on to love as a sacred solution to all of society's ills. The male actor, then, has to be turned into a naive lover, unaware of how these sexed bodies are being looked at, unaware of how it will be made maili or sullied by the world. If they respond to the erotic body erotically, it might come off as sleazy. A man cannot say to a woman, I want to have sex with you. He has to talk about her 'tan ki sundarta', the body's beauty. In some ways, words construct meaning. But elsewhere, they seem to leach meaning. The more they say the less they mean, these joyless puppets in the fag end of Kapoor's cinema that once showed us what innocence looked like. Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.
