'What will people say' phenomenon has to end: Karan Johar

Filmmaker Karan Johar says he finds it disturbing that there's a lack of information and awareness about sexual individuality.

In an interview to CNN-News18, a news channel, Johar spoke of 'men's enlightenment', and touched upon how there are people who are gay but married (to someone else) because of society pressures, and there are men who are scared to tell their parents.

Johar said, "It is very disturbing as firstly there is no information on sexual individuality. I think the most important thing is when there is information and awareness, it leads to understanding it and then it leads to get you an emotion towards it.

"When you don't have an understanding and awareness of what it is, how deeply rooted and emotional it is, well that's how it is."

He said judgments must be kept aside.

"When a man loves a woman or a man loves a man, the level of intensity is not something that you are supposed to judge. It's something you have to evolve with, it's something you have to accept, and it is a part of the human DNA," added the filmmaker.

He said the "Log kya kahenge [what will people say]" phenomenon has to end because it does not matter what anybody says because eventually what they say will pass but your life stays.

"I don't want to do anything to conform with what the world says. When you do that with confidence and you do that with conviction, let me tell you nothing can come in the way of that," he added.

When the Supreme Court on Thursday (6 September) decrimanilised homosexuality between consenting adults by declaring Section 377, the penal provision which criminalised gay sex as "manifestly arbitrary", Johar, along with a slew of celebrities, called it a "historic" judgment.