Parineeti Chopra says contractors working on her home won't listen to her as she is a woman

Actor Parineeti Chopra, who was seen in Dibakar Banerjee's Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar, has spoken about her own real life struggle with patriarchy and sexism.

Actor Parineeti Chopra played the lead in Dibakar Banerjee's latest release, Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar. As the film found a second life with an OTT release last week, more and more fans are lauding Parineeti's work and the comment it makes on various forms of sexism women have to endure in their lives.

Parineeti Chopra has spoken about how she was treated by contractors when she was renovating her home.

Speaking about how closely she has experienced sexism in her own life, Parineeti said that she, too, has not been unaffected by it. She gave example of how the contractors on the house she is getting made insist on speaking with a man for making decisions.

"This film is uniquely written. People have become so immune to the patriarchy that they don’t even think about it. Women in India face this every day. When I’m getting my house renovated, the contractors don’t talk to me properly because I’m a woman. They ask if there’s someone else at home they can talk to. I say, ‘No, I bought this house, I’ve made the payments. It’s mine so I will choose the tiles.’ When I tell them to talk to me, they refuse. This film has a lot of similarities to my personal life," she told Film Companion.

Parineeti was also asked to name her favourite scene from the movie. She said the scene which showed her character Sandy and Arjun Kapoor's Pinky eating breakfast with Neena Gupta and Raghubir Yadav's characters was her favourite. In it, Raghubir's character repeatedly asks Sandy to serve everyone food before sitting down to fix her own plate.

"My favourite scene is the ‘paratha achaar’ one in which all the men are seated while the women are standing. Neena Gupta’s character is also standing. She’s so used to the patriarchy that she’ll never ask Arjun’s character to pass the pickle, but she’ll ask me why I’m seated. While shooting this scene, I was reminded of the small town I grew up in, where the women weren’t allowed to eat till the men went to sleep. They couldn’t eat while the men were still seated at the dining table. Even at my house, my mother wasn’t allowed to sit and eat. It’s not that my father made her do this, but it was an unspoken rule in the house. The most important thing about this film was the marriage between my character, Sandy, and me – this mixture of real and reel life. This was me saying, ‘Let’s smash the patriarchy.’ We were trying to show how accepted the patriarchy is in India and how much we wish that would change," she said.

Parineeti was also recently seen in the Saina Nehwal biopic and Netflix's Hindi remake of The Girl On The Train.