How often do you find yourself looking at your reflection in the mirror and feeling, ‘this is me in my own skin; this is my body and this is who I am’?
If you might remember the iconic ‘mirror scene’ from Tina Fey’s Mean Girls (2004), you would probably agree with me when I say that we have all been insecure in ourselves. We are not born feeling insecure, right? We don’t look at our baby rolls and cry … we are mostly alright with running about with our tummies hanging, our hair being in knots, and our bodies not being or looking a certain type. So, what changes? Allow me to take you through it.
You know that society is built on the basis of a lot of fictions. Perhaps, the biggest myth about the social human body is that it is always supposed to be lacking – it is supposed to be ‘too fat’, ‘too skinny’, ‘too tall’, ‘too flawed’, and never ever enough.
One of Homegrown’s dream projects was developed when we decided to speak to women about their relationship with their bodies. One of the most memorable quotes for us was one of the participants, Malika Singh, describing the first image that had impacted her: “She is sitting on a stool, and she’s got these fashion magazine pictures all around her, of these beautiful women. She’s looking down at them, and she’s got a massive pair of scissors in her hand. She’s pinching her fat and she’s wanting to cut it. That really stayed with me because I could relate to that completely.”
To share something personal, I have always been fat. I was the fat kid in primary school, the fat girl in high school and even now that I am all grown up and eating well and going to the gym at least five days a week, I am still not not the fat woman in the room. With straight As and a rather stellar record, it was rather easy for me to not derive my confidence from my body but it was never that I was not ashamed of how I looked. I had always known that I was more than my body – that I was my ‘brilliant’ mind. However, that didn’t mean that I didn’t feel ugly or lesser-than when it came to non-academic or non-competitive circles. Of course, I have been mocked for being ‘fat’ behind my back and to my face by strangers and loved ones alike, and, of course, every time such a comment came my way, it made me feel a little smaller, a little lesser of me in myself. Tell you something, I still don’t wear sleeveless blouses and dresses, mostly because I tell myself that ‘women like me can’t’.
The truth is: I can.
As Homegrown gives me the platform to finally tell the world that I have always secretly wished I could wear sleeveless clothes, that I wish being ‘fat’ was just another compliment like ‘beautiful’ or ‘gorgeous’ and that I wish that 15-year-old me was as proud of her beautiful body and face as she was of her brains, I bring to you the stories of women of different kinds, who, much like me, share a complicated relationship with their bodies and are trying to learn to love the only thing that has literally got their back in life.
The idea behind the film is not to tell you that you are beautiful in your own way, whatever that way might be – instead, it is to remind you that you are beautiful simply by virtue of being in your own skin and that all it takes is a moment of courage to realise that we are all navigating our relationship with our bodies through similar versions of the aforementioned fictions.
Kindness to ourselves and our fellow passengers on the boat is the only way through.
Created and produced by Team Homegrown and directed by Ishaan Nair, the film features the stories of Supriya Joshi, Diva Garg, Dionne Claudette, Gouri Bhuyan, Malika Singh, and Namrata Sheth. Sarthak Johar was the DOP, Vrinda Arora, the editor, and Rahil Merchant was the colourist. Music was courtesy of Kabeer Kathpalia and Aneesha Vaswani was behind Hair & Make-up.
HG team members Diva Garg, Pooja Sivaraman, and Swati Nair brought the film from concept to reality. Nidhi Iyer is to be thanked for visual packaging and Lakhi Soni for the social edits.
We’d like to give a special shoutout to @tungsten.studios for sharing their space with us to create this film.
Find the film on YouTube here.
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