Katrina Kaif Doesn’t Need to Prove She’s Mother

Like clockwork, there is a video that floats through the internet you can’t unsee: a series of Katrina Kaif interviews where she’s an absolute badass. There’s fellow actor Aamir Khan trying to tell her where to place her hair near a mic. “Shh! Don’t be patriarchal!” she jokes back. When a man she’s interviewing tells her his best financial advice for women is “marry a rich man,” she tells him to start over. “Equal rights doesn’t mean they’re fighting to be the same gender,” she points out. She tells off ex-boyfriend and co-actor Ranbir Kapoor when he tries to take credit for all her epic dances: “Did you come here drunk?” When Shah Rukh Khan uses only one word to describe her (“gentle”), she describes working with him as just “good.” “Gentle is what?” she laughs. 

Maybe it’s because she has six sisters. Maybe it’s because she’s a Bollywood outsider. Maybe it’s because she was raised by her mother. Whatever the reason, Katrina Kaif is a woman who is not to be messed with. So imagine my — and the world’s — surprise when trolls claimed that Katrina Kaif, mother to over 35 films and a beauty empire worth at least $50 million, was “finished.” Reader, I’ve met her, and she said only kind things to everyone she met because she follows the Bambi edict: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.” But long before most even understood the word “feminist” in the Hindi film industry, the girls’ girl and one of the highest-paid actresses of her era made her feelings known: “A woman should not be taken for granted.”