Dur-e-Fishan says she would not watch or do dramas like Kaisi Teri Khudgarzi again
Drama Kaisi Teri Khudgarzi was the centre of attention last year — but not for the right reasons. It was criticised for spinning a romantic storyline out of toxic masculinity and for being misogynistic to its core. Lead actor Dur-e-Fishan, who played Mehak, differentiated between herself and her character saying she would not voluntarily watch a show like that herself or even want to act in it but she can’t deny that dramas like that do commercially well.
In an interview with BBC Asian Network, she admitted that the drama put her on the radar. “Kaisi Teri Khudgarzi made the producers or made me more feasible to the choices that I could say yes to. Today if I’m getting 10 scripts and I am not liking 10 of them, I would be getting five more because they would be like ‘Oh, we want her on board.’” she said.
Though she wouldn’t personally vouch for a drama like that, she said it resonates with the society she lives in. “Dur-e-Fishan would not watch a genre like or would even like to work in something like this again. But Dur-e-Fishan belongs to a kind of society where people really like any woman being saved from any toxic area around.”
She talked about how women are taught to rely on men. “Because our audience is just focused on [how] a girl needs to be saved by a boy. And no matter how that boy saves [her], it’s more [about] how we raise women in our culture,” she said. “We just tell them that your brother, your father, your husband is supposed to be around you. I feel like when I was reading the script, Dur-e-Fishan would not have acted the way Mehak did because Mehak is a Pakistani girl who has no experience of boys, who was never told that you are good yourself.”
The actor said that though she has started to receive more scripts that portray women as independent beings, she wonders how they will perform. “But again, are these types of dramas that will do commercially well? We hope so because it’s all a chain of producers getting their money back. If you’re not giving them the views, no matter how progressive, feminism-driven the drama might be, they won’t be able to make another one,” she added.
