If not for actor-turned-writer Twinkle Khanna's "greed" to tell a good story, the real-life Padman Arunachalam Muruganantham mistaking her for actor Raveena Tandon could have literally led to the end of his chapter in her 2016 bestselling book "The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad".
Khanna based "The Sanitary Man of Sacred Land", one of the four stories in the book, on Tamil Nadu-based Muruganantham, who created affordable sanitary napkins for the women of his village.
According to Khanna, the activist mistook her as Tandon while giving his nod to write the story.
"He looked at me and mistook me for Raveena Tandon. At that point, I didn't want to write his story but my greed was so much that I overcame that slight," she quipped during a discussion on her recently released book, "Welcome To Paradise", here at Sunder Nursery on Sunday.
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She later produced the 2018 film "Pad Man", a fictionalised account of Muruganantham's life which starred her husband actor Akshay Kumar in the lead.
Fresh from completing a master's programme in fiction writing from London's Goldsmith College, Khanna said it is fiction that makes the "truth more palatable".
The 50-year-old drove her point home with an interesting potato analogy.
"The truth is like a potato. You make French fries, you make aaloo jeera, you are presenting potatoes only. The potato's chemical composition doesn't change.
"It is just the way it is everywhere, and that's what we do with all our experiences, memories... The truth doesn't change, we just change the way we are representing it," she explained.
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A self-confessed fan of science fiction, the author advised budding writers to read genres as diverse as possible.
"No one can teach anyone to write. That would be teaching you how your perspective is shaped and that doesn't happen. But they (the experts) do teach you how you can analyse your work because you are analysing everyone else's work, and that is the sort of scaffolding you can use," said Khanna, who reads at least three-four short stories every night.
"Welcome To Paradise", published by Juggernaut Books, is a collection of stories exploring the depth of loneliness, heartbreak and deception.
