MUMBAI : Veteran actor Zeenat Aman has recalled an incident from the 1990s when one of her sons wanted to beat up one of his playmates for using "some particularly colourful vocabulary to describe me". Taking to Instagram on Saturday, Zeenat shared that her ''seething son" wanted to avenge her honour by hitting his friend with a cricket bat. Zeenat's post is a collaboration with Urban Company.
Zeenat also shared an old photo as she sat with her two children--Azaan Khan and Zahaan Khan, on her lap. While her elder son smiled, the younger one was seen making a face. In the photo, Zeenat smiled as she looked at Azaan. Zeenat also shared a video of the ad in which a brother gets angry after his friends speak wrongly about his sister, who works as a masseuse. She then explains to her brother how people speak ill about women behind their backs and gives a twist to their ill words.
Sharing the post, Zeenat wrote, "I’m much too jaded to imagine a perfect world, but I’m also enough of a dreamer to believe that it can get better. It couldn’t have been easy growing up as my sons. Though I had stepped away from the limelight by the time they were in school, they weren’t immune to the occasional crude comment, vulgar question or salacious news article about me."
Zeenat added, "That’s why this film revived a memory. It was late afternoon in Bandra in the 90s. The boys were playing at the entrance of the building with the neighbourhood kids. I wasn’t expecting them back for a few hours, but suddenly the door flew open and one seething son stormed into the house. I looked on puzzled as he jammed his helmet onto his head, strapped on his batting pads, and picked up his cricket bat. He brandished said bat and sombrely informed me that he was going to avenge my honour. You see, one of his playmates had used some particularly colourful vocabulary to describe me."
"If he hadn’t been so distraught I would have laughed, but his indignation touched me. I stopped him from unleashing his anger on his friends of course. And that night I had the first of many deep conversations with my sons about men, women and the ways of the world. None of us can be flawless in our feminism. Even here the mere suggestion of sex work is offensive, though I don’t see why a sex worker deserves any less respect than you and I. Then there’s the simple fact that even when women are belittled, it still falls on them to carry the emotional baggage of boys and men," she added.
Zeenat concluded, "So how do we do it then? How do we raise ourselves and our children to be thick-skinned but sensitive, astute and forgiving, kind not violent, empowered not indoctrinated? That’s a rhetorical question. I can’t answer it, but I do love that @urbancompany reappropriated the term ‘happy ending’, and got the kids and I talking about feminism again."
Zeenat tied the knot with actor Mazhar Khan in 1985. They were married till his death in 1998. They had two sons--Azaan and Zahaan.
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Credits - Hindustan Times
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