Gul Panag on World Mental Health Day: ‘Only if mind can be harnessed can you do anything worthwhile in life’

Actor Gul Panag believes it is important to work on our mental health as much as we work on our physical health. She believes that her acting career has been an enabler of everything else she wanted to do in life be it becoming a licensed pilot or completing her law degree. On being a mother and managing a career, Gul Panag says that the balancing act really comes down to the fact that a lioness has no option, but to hunt and also take care of her child. She believes that true revolution in the entertainment industry will arrive only when equal numbers of male and female parts are being written. Edited excerpts from the interview: On World Mental Health Day what is your message to people and how do you take care of your mental health? My message to the people with regard to their mental health is work on it as much as you work on your physical health. And frankly that has been a delayed realisation. I think if I had worked on my mental health earlier then maybe I wouldn’t have had many years of my life in anguish which we all go through at some point of time or the other because we are not open to discussing or acknowledging mental health as an important part of our life. My journey with dealing with mental health started with awareness and realising that one needs to take care of one’s mental health with as much dedication and commitment as your physical health. You may be running marathons and looking very fit apparently, but if your mind is all over the place it is not going to help. Only if mind can be harnessed can you do anything else. What do you do to keep yourself mentally fit? I do a lot of things because mental wellbeing is very important to me. I practice gratitude and in my gratitude journal I write what are the things I need to be grateful for. I start my day with a gratitude journal. That just changes your attitude towards life. If you start focusing on what you already have, it makes the pain of what has been taken from you or the pain not right in your life seem lesser and insignificant and that allows you to focus on the positives in your life. I don’t dwell on the negatives and I also use gratitude as a practice, so if I am having a particularly hard time, I hit pause and ask myself what are the five things I am happy with at this moment. If I am having a bad day and things are going downhill and spiraling into a way that I can’t control and that happens to all of us, then what I do is I step aside and think about the five amazing things that I have in my life right now. That makes me feel better. Your journey in the entertainment industry. For me I have always seen my acting career as an enabler of everything else that I wanted to do and as a platform that allowed me to do a lot of other things and live my life to the fullest. I never viewed my acting career as an end. While I pursued my acting career I have also pursued many individual life goals be it my masters in political science, post which I studied and trained to get my private pilot license and post which I enrolled in law school. So, my pursuits in life continued in pursuit of my career. So, how satisfied am I and how I see my journey is very fulfilling. My acting life is just one part of my life, I have other robust life and I thankful that my acting career is an enabler of all the other things that I want to do. [caption id=“attachment_11415091” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Gul Panag with her kid[/caption] On being a mother and managing a career…how do you do the balancing act? I think women since time immemorial had to do the balancing act. In the wild you had to protect your child and even hunt. You had to take care of everything – be a hunter, gatherer and nurturer. Now life has become easy for women because of the support system we have. In my opinion the balancing act really comes down to the fact that a lioness has no option, but to hunt and also take care of her child. And that is typically in all of the animal kingdom. Everybody just does it differently. On the OTT revolution… The OTT revolution has created a wide and varied content. Also content consumption has gone up dramatically because our consumption pattern has changed. We as viewers too consume much more content than what we did few years back. We were earlier watching movies in a theatre. But now we are watching movies and shows in the train, cab, in-between meeting both long form and short form content. So, it’s a great time to be an actor, technician, a director and an actor. But revolution will arrive only when an equal number of male and female parts are being written. Cinema is an art form that reflects society and if a society is patriarchal or male dominated, your content is going to reflect that so let’s not kid ourselves and say that revolution has arrived. If 1000 pieces of shows and films are being made and only if we have 500 pieces and shows headlined by women, then only can we say yes there is equality. But of course, we are seeing many more parts because overall women’s participation in society is going up and as we begin to see women in more fields in society then that will be reflected in art going up. On playing the role of a lawyer in Good Bad Girl and what made you agree to play the role?  I play Zaina Mistry in Good Bad Girl who is the managing partner of a law firm. The show is beautifully written and it is quirky with multiple layers in every character. My part remains to be level headed and balanced. This is not a courtroom drama and is set in a law firm. It’s not a show that needed me to do a lot of homework or go out of my way to do things differently as an actor. What attracted me was that Vikas Bahl was producing it and how women headlined parts are seen and viewed in a different way. We typically see women headline parts as very black or white, largely white where women who are on a crusade to get justice, strong women who are fighting the system, good women with no shades of black or we see a completely black shaded woman who plays a negative character out and out. But the real spectrum of humanity lies between black and white and what I find fascinating and what is fresh here is that the writing here with regard to every single character is multi-layered. What made me say yes to it was that I just finished studying for my law degree last year and the very first role that I was offered was that of a lawyer. So, I felt I must do it. 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