‘It is good to feel like a man’

‘It is good to feel like a man’ says actress Rani Mukherji, who is even up for a film on racism if it’ll help change people’s mindset.

Cinema can go a long way in promoting positive bilateral relations between Australia and India, especially Bollywood films as they are "all about heart", said Rani Mukherji, present as chief guest at the 2010 Indian Film Festival — Bollywood and Beyond, in Sydney. The festival, which opened with Black and Dil Bole Hadippa in Sydney, is screening a retrospective of Rani’s distinctive films alongside recent Bollywood hits.

So will she act in a film on racism? “If there is a great character for me to play, if I feel there is something interesting in the film about racism and if there is a positive outlook towards changing the mindset, I would hundred percent do it,” she said.

The actress is looking forward to No one killed Jessica, a film based on the murder of Delhi model Jessica Lall in which she plays a journalist. “It is a very different and powerful role; so I don’t know how my fans are going to react to it, but I am looking forward to it as it is an interesting movie based on a true life story,” she said.

For Rani, every role is a dream role, but the role that debutant director Anurag Singh gave her in Dil Bole Hadippa was “wonderful”. “It is wonderful being a man and to feel like a man and get attracted to beautiful women. I also got to experiment with cricket, a sport I had never played in my life. I trained for eight months and fell in love with the game,” said the actress.

Rani also revealed that if she weren’t an actress, she would have been “a housewife with my sari tucked in my waist, making chapattis for my husband, raising two kids probably in Allahabad or Kolkata or somewhere where my parents would have married me off”!