Dipika Chikhlia: Showing Ravan as roadside gunda wasn't in good taste

New Delhi,UPDATED: Jun 7, 2024 20:20 IST

After expressing her displeasure over ‘Ramayana’ remake by Nitesh Tiwari, Dipika Chikhlia spoke to IndiaToday.in about Prabhas and Kriti Sanon and Saif Ali Khan’s ‘Adipurush’. The 2023 film by Om Raut opened to massive expectations, however, was brutally criticised for its dialogues, VFX and poor screenplay.

Dipika Chikhlia told us that the kids who watched ‘Adipurush’ came back ‘affected’ from the movie halls and this bothers her. She said, “Every time what happens is, a child, who is five years old or eight years old who has watched ‘Adipurush’ with his parents - when he grows up, his image will be all about what was there in ‘Adipurush’. That is damaging your future. That bothers me, more than anything else.”

“At that point of time, your parents are not going to explain that Ravan wasn’t like this. He didn’t eat non-vegetarian food, Sita wasn’t like this. Nobody's explaining that to the child. They're just coming back and absolutely shocked. But that child has been affected and has been damaged, and it's not going to go back,” the actor said.

For the unaware, one of the most controversial scenes in ‘Adipurush’ had Ravan relishing non-vegetarian food. Dipika pointed out, “Ravana was a Brahmin. He was a Shiv bhakt. There were so many good qualities in him. He wasn’t just a villain. He was not just a bad man. The only bad thing that he did was that he abducted somebody's wife. That was a very wrong thing. Otherwise, he was a vidwan (a scholar). Usko ek roadside gunda dikhana was not in good taste (Portraying him as a roadside thug was not in good taste).”

We asked Dipika Chikhlia about whether she watched ‘Adipurush’ and if she was disappointed by the results. “I watched a little bit on the TV and I was very, very hurt. I didn't like it at all”, she said.

Watch the trailer of 'Adipurush' here:

Apart from being an actor, Chikhlia is a hands-on politician. We asked about her seamless transition from acting to politics and whether her experience from the entertainment industry ever influenced her political career.

“You grow as a person and your perspective as a person gets very rich with different kinds of people you meet and experiences that you have. That adds up to who you become. That's when you take the right decisions.”

She continued, “I have worked in a business with my husband, I've been in politics, been an actor. There are a lot of decisions that you take. You take the experience, and you know what is going to work and what will not. That really helps when you are in different fields. If you are just an actor, you have a very limited sense of what to do. But when you have business background, political background, you have an experience which is almost 360-degree. That makes you who you are and that helps you with your decision-making.”

On the work front, Dipika Chikhlia is an actor and also the producer of her daily soap, ‘Dhartiputra Nandini’.