Upset my peers, alienated music directors: Sona
eing vocal is synonymous with Sona Mohapatra. The singer has time and again raised her ce against a lot of things, and e knows that it impacted a lot of ngs for her personally and ofessionally.
One such issue she strongly believes s the representation of female gers in the music industry. She says e has been talking about it for eight rs. “Be it big music festivals, eases or in mainstream… even if u switch on the radio, you will see t out of 10 songs, you will at best d two songs with female voices. Out 00 songs, only eight-nine have male voices, solo female songs have mpletely been down in mainstream. s all about testosterone,” says the year-old, popular for songs such as barsariya and Jiya Laage Na. Talking about music festivals, e says they have had “poor resentation” of female artistes, ich she puts at “a pathetic 3%”. “I s calling it out, upsetting my peers, enating a lot of music directors, ys who call the shots, because I come across as a troublesome woman, all the time complaining. But here’s the good news. After all those years of calling out NH7 music festival, I didn’t get invited by them, but in their last edition the representation suddenly went up from an average of 4-5% to 21%. It was a significant jump, so they did listen, maybe there was a certain embarrassment or consciousness,” says Mohapatra.
She feels ‘troublesome women’ like her do help make that change. “You don’t necessarily endear yourself to everyone,” says the singer, whose National Award-winning documentary Shut Up Sona will have its Australian premiere at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne and is also nominated in the Best Documentary category for the IFFM awards.
She is naturally excited. “At a time when many of my peers were investing in online followers, I decided to jump off the cliff, invest a huge chunk of my savings and produced this film with zero backing and complete belief. To be selected at IFFM among the hundreds of submissions to the festival this pandemic year is special... this is our first screening Down Under,” says the singer.
Fondly remembering her mother, late actor Sridevi on her birth anniversary on Friday, actor Janhvi Kapoor shared a throwback picture on social media.
The Dhadak (2018) actor expressed her love for her late mother by sharing a memory from her childhood featuring herself and Sridevi, in which they are beaming with joy. “Happy birthday Mumma. I miss you. Everything is for you, always, everyday. I love you,” she captioned her post on Instagram.
She also added a red heart emoji to her post, which many replicated in the comments section. Her post was showered with red hearts from many celebrities, including Dia Mirza, Maheep Kapoor, Shanaya Kapoor and Manish Malhotra.