Twinkle Khanna remembers her 2015 column that led to Padman

Akshay Kumar’s Padman, which just revealed its first poster today, 27 November, is due to be released in two months on 26 January, Republic Day.

Akshay’s wife, Twinkle Khanna, launched her own production house, Mrs Funnybones Movies, for the film. Earlier, she co-produced Tees Maar Khan (2010), Thank You (2011), Patiala House (2011) and Khiladi 786 (2012), all of which starred her husband.

Padman is based on social entrepreneur Arunachalam Muruganatham who invented machine to produce low-cost sanitary napkins. The former actress revealed, on Twitter, the inspiration behind launching her own production house and co-producing Padman — a newspaper column in 2015, in which she blasted away the myths behind menstruation.  

Khanna tweeted, “A journey that began in 2015 with this very column followed by #TheLegendofLakshmiPrasad in 2016 with Muruganantham's story and finally #Padman 2018 #LetsTalkAboutItPeriod.”

Khanna became a published author in 2015 with Mrs Funnybones and followed it up with a second book of short stories in 2016, titled The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad. One of the stories in the book, The Sanitary Man of Sacred Land, is based on Muruganatham's life.

In the March 2015 column, Khanna had written about her house help leaving parcels wrapped in newspaper on her desk. It turned out to be sanitary napkins. She asked the very pertinent question, “Why are sanitary napkins treated like radioactive isotopes? They are wrapped in layers of plastic and newspaper, then someone ties a string over this mysterious package and then it’s put in a bag of its own — separate from any vegetables or cereal boxes that it may contaminate by its very presence.”

She recalled boarding-school stories of her friends and classmates from conservative backgrounds who had to “stay in isolated rooms with plates of food being left outside their doors during ‘that time of the month’ as they were considered impure for that duration”.

Khanna listed many of the myths surrounding menstruation that have persisted through the ages and dismissed them all with logic. “Menstruating doesn’t cause pickles to spoil, temples to collapse or food to rot, nor is it contagious, though it would be rather nice to infect the male population with this so-called ‘curse’ for a month or two, just to sit back and view what I am sure would be a highly entertaining spectacle,” she wrote.