I’m headstrong, bossy and I am who I am: Ratna Pathak Shah

Mrs Kapoor from “Kapoor and Sons” and Usha Parmar from “Lipstick under My Burkha” are mere glimpses of the potential that resides in acting powerhouse Ratna Pathak Shah, who asserts she can and wants to play all kinds of characters on screen.The actor credits the writers of these films — Shakun Batra-Ayesha Devitre Dhillon and Alankrita Shrivastava — for developing characters which saw her sift through a variety of feelings.”I feel lucky to be around when roles are being written for women of my age. It’s just a very fortunate condition that over the last few years the quality of scriptwriting has improved dramatically,” Ratna told PTI in an interview.The 55-year-old actor believes there is a more free examining of issues in storytelling today.”The exploration of different issues has become much more open and much more free. People are taking risks and I just happen to be there at the right time. That is good for me,” she added.Ratna next plays a headstrong headmistress of an academy in Netflix original “Selection Day” and the actor said she yearns for more such parts.”I’m headstrong, I’m bossy and I am who I am. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be anything else. I can be many other things and I want to be many other things… That’s what an actor really wants People different than who you are. I am who I am in any case,” she said.Recounting her past work as beginner in the industry, Ratna said that lack of good offers felt like a wonderful opportunity to perform as it eliminated the choice factor.”I did a fair amount of work earlier when so many such roles were not being written. One chooses from the offers one gets. So for me, again I was lucky that I got very few offers and therefore there was not an element of choice. But whatever offers I got were very good and very different from each other.”Right at the beginning, my first thing was ‘Idhar Udhar’, which was a comedy and I had never done comedy before that. I was very worried about that.”