Early morning on Wednesday, actor Nimrat Kaur of Lunchbox fame took to Instagram to announce her body transformation journey for the recently released film Dasvi. She posted a before and after picture along with three sections of a write-up that traces her journey from being fit to plump and back. The caption read “Weigh on it… Swipe left for my thousand words this picture won’t speak.”
Written by Ritesh Shah and directed by debutante Tushar Jalota, the film demanded Nimrat to step into the shoes of Bimla Devi “Bimmo” Chaudhary, interim CM of a fictional state Harit Pradesh. The film revolves around the story of an uneducated politician (Abhishek Bachchan) who is put behind bars under the surveillance of a tough cop (Yami Gautam). The politician eventually realises the value of education during his term while his scheming wife, portrayed by Nimrat plans her own plots to make her designation permanent.
The introductory part of her post reads “In the age of heightened expectations regarding what we ‘should’ look like, at all times – gender, age and profession no bar, I’m sharing a small chapter from my life that brought with it learnings that shall last a lifetime. Bear with me, as unfortunately, there isn’t a ‘bite-sized’ version of this 10-month-long journey…”
She pointed out in her post how often she would be put under scrutiny for those extra kilos. Some people went to an extent of making snide remarks and unsolicited jokes about her weight gain, failing to realise her ‘larger than usual’ body and meal could as well as be because of some underlying sickness, medication, or hormonal imbalance. She further added, that the extra pounds could have been due to the sheer happiness she sought out from eating whatever she wanted to as well, which people clearly failed to realise or acknowledge.
For her role in this social comedy-drama, Nimrat had to put on about 15 kilos to get into her character. The gritty actor addressed trolls and comments she had to deal with during this period by concluding the post with “Be kind. Be sensitive. Be graceful. Don’t make someone’s day worse if you can’t make it better. Be responsible. Make your mind and body your business. No one else’s.”
Distributed by Netflix, the movie released on April 7 and has received mixed reviews from the critics and audiences so far.