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To be very clear, I am not a fan of Priyanka Chopra. At the outset, I want to admit that I had my reservations about Priyanka Chopra being the chosen one for Penguin India’s annual lecture. There’s no dearth of writers, editors, publishers, and even journalists out there who would have been more suitable candidates.
That point wasn’t lost on Twitter, with many people questioning Chopra’s selection to speak at an event that previously hosted speakers like the Dalai Lama, Amartya Sen, Ruskin Bond, Dan Brown, Amitabh Bachchan and many more.
Why am I speaking about this now? Because all I am reading for the past two weeks on Twitter and many media houses is criticism of her selection.
Eyebrows were raised for two major reasons: It was the first time in 11 years that a woman was speaking at the event and secondly, Chopra’s selection, rather than a female literary personality, to speak on the topic ‘Breaking the glass ceiling and chasing a dream’ didn’t seem right to many.
With my own set of inhibitions, I made my way to Delhi’s Siri Fort Auditorium where the now international star was expected to talk.
I wasn’t disappointed.
To all those questioning her contribution to literature, my question to them is – Was Amitabh Bachchan asked this question when he spoke at the same event? To be clear, this is what the Penguin press release said:
“The Penguin Annual Lecture is an initiative to bring leading writers, artists, thinkers and key personalities from India and the world in direct contact with their admirers.”
Artist: Check. Key personality: Check. So all those who think the Penguin Annual Lecture should have a ‘literary personality’ speaking, their argument is demolished right there.
Was it about drawing the eyeballs? Definitely. But isn’t that the whole point of having someone like Priyanka Chopra with a massive global fan base as a speaker? Wouldn’t that draw the attention of a larger audience towards the issues that she was there to highlight?
“If you want to be Priyanka Chopra, be fierce, fearless and flawed,” said Chopra in he speech explaining that she had a problem with the term ‘breaking the glass ceiling.’ While opening the speech, she explained:
The phrase (breaking the glass ceiling) takes the context of everything that I have achieved and all my hardwork and puts it into a box as if my ambition was to be in a glass ceiling and break it.Priyanka Chopra
While talking about ‘PC’s 12 rules of becoming the best version of yourself ’, she gave the audience the keys to hold the reins of your own life and live it successfully.
The more interesting bit was her conversation with NDTV’s Sonia Singh when the actress spoke intelligently about a range of issues – pay discrimination, women’s rights, sexual abuse, even Padmavati.
The Takeaways
When asked about her annual income of over $10 million and her being listed amongst Forbes’ highest paid actors of 2017, she highlighted a bigger problem.
There are so many people who ask me about the number of zeroes for the number of minutes I spend, but why aren’t men asked this question? Their zeroes are ridiculous. My question is why aren’t there more women on that list?Priyanka Chopra
Point taken. She was the only Indian female celebrity to make it to the list. So she did break the glass ceiling here.
The Harvey Weinstein issue, not surprisingly, was brought up during the conversation leading to a discussion about abuse of power by men. Chopra made a not-so-shocking revelation:
I have been thrown out of so many films last minute because some actor’s girlfriend was recommended or some director’s girlfriend was recommended. I couldn’t do anything at that time because I didn’t have the power. I was thrown out because somebody else was catering to the whims and fancies of powerful men.Priyanka Chopra
Yet she is here today, making waves nationally and internationally. That sounds like breaking the glass ceiling to me.
“Women are always told that it was their fault or they asked for it. They did not. I won’t call them victims, I’ll call them surviors. But there shouldn’t be a society where women survive, there should be a society where women thrive”, she added.
After attaining international stardom with Quantico and many Hollywood stints lined up, she narrated her experience of being a presenter at the Emmy’s where Aziz Ansari and Riz Ahmed were a few south Asian actors who won.
In the afterparty, there were some 400 people in the room, and we were celebrating (the fact) that there were four of us (South Asians) in that room. But Aziz (Ansari) said, eight years ago, there was just one.Priyanka Chopra
If this example doesn’t fit the bill of ‘breaking the glass ceiling’, then I’m not sure what does.
Narrating her experience of facing racism while schooling in the US as a kid, she said, “I was the only Indian girl in my school. They called me brownie. They called me curry. When you are just 15, it’s really scary. You look at yourself and start thinking what’s wrong with me and what can I change about myself? But the fact that you don’t change anything about yourself and still get the world to notice you is a success story in itself.”
For the record, this is the same country in which she won the People’s Choice Award twice (glass ceiling shattered).
So, Did She Fit the Bill?
These anecdotes are just a few examples of why Chopra was a good choice to speak on the topic of ‘breaking the glass ceiling’.
It’s not just about her stardom or fan base, she is unarguably a personality beyond the ‘bollywood actor’ tag. Her philanthropic profile is as strong as her super stardom. She is a personality who contributes equally towards global and social causes as much as she contributes to the entertainment industry.
Here is a woman who has fought her way to the top; here is a woman who has become a global Indian with not just her work in the entertainment industry, but also with her philanthropic contributions to society; here is a woman who has won the People’s Choice Award twice in the same country she faced racism in as a school kid.
She is breaking stereotypes, gender biases, addressing the issues that matter, contributing to social causes massively and getting heard internationally for the same. She is breaking the glass ceiling.
Just because she hasn’t penned a book yet, does it make her any less a key personality or a contributor to society compared to her predecessors? Are the ones criticising her selection as a speaker not being able to look at her beyond her ‘actor’ tag?
Then why are questions being raised about her delivering the lecture at the event? A classic case of ‘haters gonna hate’ maybe?
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