Girls, Demand Sanitary Napkins Instead of Fairness Creams: Twinkle

Twinkle Khanna and Arunachalam Muruganantham had the audience eating out of their hands at We The Women summit.

Twinkle Khanna with the original ‘PadMan’, Arunachalam Muruganantham

(Photo courtesy: Twitter)

Twinkle Khanna and the original ‘PadMan’, Arunachalam Muruganantham, had the audience eating out of their hands during the panel discussion ‘Let’s Talk About it. Period’ at We The Women. The summit is taking place in Mehboob Studios, Mumbai and is being curated and moderated by journalist Barkha Dutt.

Khanna and Muruganantham discussed the visceral extent of taboos faced by women for the biological function of menstruation, and how they hope the upcoming film PadMan can be a conversation-starter in the field.

Watch the entire discussion here:

Muruganantham shared how he went about wearing sanitary napkins for three weeks with animal blood dripping into them through a pipe - simply to understand what it is exactly that women feel. “90 per cent women in our country can’t afford sanitary napkins, and only healthy women can make developed nations,” said the social entrepreneur, who has invented a low-cost sanitary napkin machine.

Khanna pointed out that if our male politicians had to go around wearing a sanitary napkin even for a day, the product would be free instead of having GST levied on it.

We are saving the entire species from extinction but we have to keep it under wraps... Muruganantham’s a remarkable story and only cinema can take his story to every household. If <i>PadMan </i>can start a conversation and encourage girls and women to say, let’s not buy ‘Fair and Lovely’, instead we need a packet of sanitary napkins, it would be enough.

Twinkle Khanna

The panel also touched upon the much-talked about issue of “period leave”. Members of the audience also contributed period stories of their own to the discussion.