‘Sober’ Pooja Bhatt says will be delighted to take a role dealing with alcohol

Actor Pooja Bhatt is six years sober and she is proud of her journey and the person she has become today. She tells us, “The greatest achievement in my life has been to first acknowledge that I was dependent on alcohol. I was not in denial about it. If you look at any addictive behaviour whether to a substance or to a person or to work, it is an illness of denial.”

The 50-year-old was recently seen in R Balki’s Chup: Revenge of the Artist and earned appreciation for her role in web show Bombay Begums(2021). The actor shares the web series would not have happened if she was not sober. “I am so full of gratitude because I believe the universe gives you things when you are ready for it,” she adds.

Bhatt recently celebrated six years of her sobriety with an Instagram post that read: “Six years sober today.. Gratitude,gravitas,grace.”

Ask if will she be willing to take up roles dealing with alcohol, she asserts, “Of course, I will be delighted to take a role like this because I have a greater understanding. Besides playing drunk or not playing drunk that there is a certain degree of self-loathing. There is shame that you feel. There are a lot of feelings that a person who uses a substance feels. People who are dependent do not want to be dependant in 80% of the cases.”

Bhatt recalls how once shooting the play version of her film Daddy (1989) she asked her father, filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt if the world would accept this film if it was the mother who left her child behind, became an alcoholic and came back 17 or 18 years later and would society be as kind to a woman because it is very kind to men. Bhatt feels men are allowed their addictions but women still hide and drink.

She shares that the rewards for being sober have been plenty as earlier she drank copiously and lived copiously. Introspecting on her journey, the actor ponders over the biggest change she has witnessed in herself and tells us, “I do not want to see myself reflected in a man’s eyes to be worthy. With alcohol going, my dependency on the greatest illusion called love (is gone). I am enjoying single blessedness and if I think that if do hold somebody’s hand and walk the path of life then I would like a companion and not want a solution.”