Daily Times

MUMBAI: Celebrity hairstylist Sapna Moti Bhavnani has been very vocal about her dislike for actor Salman Khan. And she has often been abused by Khan followers for it. In June, when she condemned Khan’s rape comment on Twitter, she even received rape threats for it.

But when she has decided to make a debut as a writer, she is choosing to not write about him. “This man really misuses people and I don’t’ have to give him importance… especially in my book,” says Sapna, whose memoir will be called Chapter One.

But she does talk about the rape comment, “It’s insulting to have an Indian man talk like that on an international platform. I am embarrassed to call myself an Indian when statements like these go out worldwide. I was very vocal about it on Twitter, and everywhere. I got a lot of flak for it, but flak or stalkers and trollers should not be the reason why you should stop voicing the truth.”

“It’s (comments on Twitter) insane, if you read some of the crap that was written… you’d know. Before I started blocking them, I was reporting them to Twitter, my point is to get them off Twitter, but when twitter was also not taking necessary action, I had to block them, because I couldn’t let them affect my mental health. These guys are hired by the Khan and political parties… these people have zero followers, but every day they come to slam you.”

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This is not the first time that she has received threats for speaking against Khan. After she came out of the Bigg Boss house, a show that Khan hosts, she was threatened with dire consequences. “Actually a lot of people told me, I was warned that you shouldn’t talk about him like that because you could get killed, and I was like, ‘what!’ I had heard rumours, but I have been channeling this ‘no fear’ thing for the past four years and I am not going to let a monkey scare me. I have been through a gang rape, I know what it feels like, I am a surviving member… there is nothing worse you can do to me really,” says Sapna, who will write about her gang rape in the book which will be published by Harper Collins India.

She had done a play on being gang raped at 24, “but that didn’t have much reach, so I quit”. Later, she had written a post for the Facebook page, Humans of Bombay, the post had gone viral. Now she will write about it in her book, which is about a lot of “first chapters” in her life. “I still don’t know, if I have the guts to talk about my rape, but I can start a new chapter one of my life once it (rape) is out of the system, so there will be a chapter on that too.”

“Being strong doesn’t mean you can’t cry. Just because you are strong you can’t cry, you can’t heal.. It’s a phase of healing, which you can’t have. That’s a wrong notion about being strong… they say you are a man you can’t cry, that’s not correct. And this strong woman image that I have, has been a curse in many ways. This is where I want to speak, this is the wrong notion of strength because people think if you are strong you can’t do this.”

And talking of harrowing experiences, she says her Bigg Boss stint was a “bad experience”. “You have a male chauvinistic pig as a host of this show, that insults people, so people watch the show, and people worship him on the show because people want a job in one of his stupid movies where he dances like a monkey – that’s big boss in a nutshell,” she says.

At the same time, she had her reasons to take up the show, and become part of the season 6 of the show. “They had been after me for the longest time. I had just come back from Europe and they were harassing me like, ‘please come on the show.’ So I asked my mom that these ‘people have been after my life to be on the show, what should I do’? My mom looked at me and she was like, ‘you know, Sapna, women like you would never be represented on Indian TV.

It’s very important that you go on the show… you need to show the people of India that there are women like you in this country, women who have a voice, women who can’t be bought by money, women who can’t be bought by fame’. She made sense, I went, my point was taken, my job was done,” she says.

Her book is going to be about all the ‘chapter ones’ in her life. “I wrote chapter one and it was so good I could not do chapter two. Isn’t that life? You are always trying to complete one thing in life and then you move on to the next. So this book is going to be about all the chapter ones in life, everything is a new beginning. People ask me if it is going to be non-fiction or fiction, but, ‘if you can’t tell, I am not telling’.”