New Delhi: Bollywood actor Kajol, who was last seen in ‘Salaam Venky’, recently opened up on how she dealt with judgement over her look when she started her career. Kajol made her Bollywood debut with ‘Bekhudi’ when she was 16. The actress didn’t meet the conventional beauty standards and was trolled for her skin colour, and unibrows.
In an interview with ‘Humans of Bombay’, the actor was asked how she dealt with comments on her looks and she replied, “So I didn’t really deal with it, to be honest. I just put it into a compartment, and I put it away. I always thought I was way more intelligent than all these people who were commenting on me and I still think that. There were a lot of tags at that point of time. ‘She is dark, she is fat’…So many things. ‘She wears specs all the time’ because I couldn’t see, I would wear my specs everywhere but I knew I was smart, cool, and better than everyone out there who had any negatives to say for me. So, I kept continuing to be myself and never let it show. Sooner or later, when they couldn’t pull me down, the world simply embraced me for who I was.”
She also shared that she has struggled with her skin and didn’t believe that she is beautiful. She said it took her time to reach the place where she looked in the mirror and told herself that she is beautiful.
“It took me a long time to believe I was actually beautiful. I thought I was cool, I thought I was attractive, I thought I was intelligent, but I never believed I was beautiful. It took me a very long time, I think I was 32-33 when I actually began to look in the mirror and think, ‘Damn, she looks good!’ So, it took me a lot of time to believe it, but I never let it show. Like I said, you fake it, till you believe it and eventually you will believe it,” she said.
Kajol also said that she was confident that she was doing something right because of the love by the audience. “There were lots of things that lots of people told me but I was like I’m still doing well, right? So there must be something right in that whole baggage of things they put on me. I couldn’t take them that seriously,” she told Humans Of Bombay.