We are what we choose to be: Deepika bats for women empowerment in new short film

After Alia Bhatt and Madhuri Dixit , we now have Deepika Padukone starring in a Vogue empowerment video, titled My Choice. Directed by Cocktail and Finding Fanny maker, Homi Adajania, this short video is about women empowerment. The black-and-white video shows the 29-year-old actress calling for change in the “caged” mindset of men about women and asking them to stop judging the fairer sex for their choices of clothes, profession and life. “It is my choice to live life the way I want, to wear clothes I like, to decide how I want my body to be, when I want to get married or if I ever want to walk down the aisle, to decide if I want to be straight or a lesbian…,” Deepika said in the video. [caption id=“attachment_2178537” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] A screengrab from the Vogue video.[/caption] It shows 99 women from different fields of life reiterating their right to choose – what to wear, how to look, whether to marry or not, have kids or not, when to come home and most importantly how to love. The video reminds society that the bindis on women’s forehead, the (wedding) rings on their fingers, adding husbands’ surnames to their names are mere ornaments which can be replaced anytime. Based on a piece written by Kersi Khambatta, the video is a montage of all these women posing infront of the camera as Padukone’s voice over narrates lines like: " My pleasure may be your pain, My songs your noise, My order your anarchy, Your sins my virtue. My choices are like my fingerprints They make me unique" While it’s Padukone’s voice which has been used as the voice over and the actress also makes a few appearances in the video, there are also other known faces that come and go as the video goes on. It features actress Nimrat Kaur, film critic Anupama Chopra as well as hair stylist Adhuna Akhtar. Other known faces in the video are Farhan Akhtar’s wife Adhuna and sister Zoya and Homi’s designer wife Anaita. All the 99 women are dressed in black attires. The clip is a part of the Vogue’s initiative on women’s empowerment, #VogueEmpower and is penned by Kersi Khambatta, who was the co-writer in “Being Cyrus” and “Finding Fanny”. Talking about women empowerment at the launch of the video, Padukone said , " I personally feel empowered when you are not caged, when you don’t succumb to expectations, when you speak your mind and you do the things that you want to do or you do the things that make you happy." You can watch the video here. It was launched last night and has already garnered about three lakh likes on youtube.  

The video has already started going viral with many shares and retweets on the social media. From Amitabh Bachchan to Arjun Kapoor, many B-town celebrities have also shared this video on Twitter: