Kriti Sanon: My mother has always stood up for herself, and I learnt that from her

This year, Mother’s Day is going to be unlike any other. Most of us will be making the most of our time at home with our moms. And those who are currently far away from their mothers, will possibly be doing video chats with them. Kriti Sanon is among the fortunate ones, as she is with her mom in her Mumbai home during the lockdown. The actress proudly tells us about how her mother, Geeta, was the first woman in their family to get a job and how she forged her way ahead by fighting patriarchal stereotypes.
Kriti shares, “My mother, a Physics professor, completed her PhD after I was born. My grandparents would say, ‘Kya karogi itna padhayi karke, naukri karke?’, but she never relented. And thank God that she didn’t, because whatever I have imbibed from her has made me what I am, today.”
The 'Luka Chuppi' actress says that she has also drawn her strong ideas of feminism from her mother. She adds, “I think my values, thoughts, opinions, a lot of it comes from my mother. She has been an empowered person. She stood up for herself and never gave into bias or discrimination. She would question rules and rituals and would never follow them until they made sense to her. If I am a feminist today, that’s because I have learnt to stand up for myself from my mother. She supported me in my choices. She wanted to learn singing, but wasn’t allowed to. So, she didn’t want me to give up on my dreams. Despite being an academically-inclined person herself, she let me pursue my Bollywood dreams once I completed my BTech, because she did not want the world to tell me that I couldn’t do what I wanted to.”
For Kriti, maa ke haath ka khaana can match none other, but for Mother’s Day, she has planned to reverse the role and indulge her mom with freshly-baked chocolate tarts and a lovely home-cooked meal dished out by her sister Nupur and her.