Today, India’s mainstream cinema’s heroines today, are B-school grads, prized for their Bimbette Quotient. Shorn of BQ, they become nobodies, ciphers. Having internalised the male gaze, they allow themselves to be physically, emotionally and visually abused in their professions. Like the disturbing characters of roman Polanski’s films, they seem to exist between the unreal and surreal. In Bollywood, the ordinary but intelligent face for female leads is rare, and screen tests routinely reject talent simply because if the face does not possess prescribed notions of beauty.

t’s one of those lines that socks you between the eyes. In her debut film ‘Girlfight,’ the attractive Puerto Rican actress Michelle Rodriguez plays a drifting teenager who finds meaning to life in boxing. Here’s why she
persuaded her director to drop a love scene. “I did not mind being hit, and I could not care about being hurt,’’ she says. “I just did not want my breasts touched by another actor.’’