Kangna Ranaut stands alone among her contemporaries today as an actress with acting powers unmatched but when she became a known face, there were discussions on how ‘small town girls’ have made it big in B-town, probing her background, her home town in Himachal... “Let people say whatever they wish to. It’s a beautiful place,” she explains. Here, she talks of her past and how it has made her the person she is... 

Were your parents strict with you?
I was never a naughty child, never troubled my mother. If you ask my parents they will say that I was very quiet, very peaceful and very scared of them. If they asked me to sit somewhere after five hours I would still be there. (Laughs)

Did you lead a very restricted life?
Yeah, I did. I wasn’t allowed to leave home after 6 o’clock so I would always make sure that I would go out late in the night. Then when my parents would say something like, ‘Andhera ho gaya hai, tum late aayi,’ I would just say ‘yes’. Slowly I became a person who wouldn’t listen to anyone. My father would be very upset with the clothes that I would wear. I don’t know what I wanted to prove. Now when I go home, I usually wear a salwaar kameez and wonder, why was I torturing them? (Laughs).

When was the first time you fell in love?
I was quite young. He was my English teacher, a very good-looking guy and I was just a 13-year-old. That was the time I became aware of my sexuality. That was a beautiful romance because in my mind I used to romance him and he would be teaching me. 

How does living in a small town (Manali) compare to living in Mumbai?
These are two completely different worlds. This one is completely fake and that one is the real world. In Manali people live with animals. They feed them fodder and clean them too. So much of nature is involved there that you stay balanced. Here you deal with cars, roads, and buildings, if you see a beggar, you treat him like a building and you treat a building like a human being.

Isn’t it all-difficult for a young girl to manage?
I came to Mumbai because I thought everybody came to Mumbai after Delhi. It is and that’s what gets you into trouble. How do people get into problems? Actually they are the biggest problems for themselves. I got carried away with the life here, the nightlife, discos and the whole city life.

You didn’t have any aspirations?
From childhood I would tell my parents and I would become somebody very famous. They used to be very rude to me when I would say this but for me it was always a matter of fact. I knew I was going to be what I wanted to be even if I had no idea what that was.

And when you were rejected at the auditions, did it dent in your confidence?
It did. I went through a lot of insecurities. I was leading a very random life for a year before I got Gangster. My parents would tell me that I would never be anyone and they would say all sort of negative things and I would think maybe they were right. I would think of myself as a loser in every sense, not only professionally but also in my personal life.

Is there anything that you hated about yourself and wanted to change?
I hated everything about myself, my life, everything. I was very uncomfortable about the clothes that I wore. I used to wear those really cheap clothes, buy them from streets and wear them and I looked like a 16-year-old coming from some village trying to be modern. Life was strange without parents, proper food, and proper house, nothing at all in place. I would go on for weeks and weeks without thinking where I was heading. That was a phase I remember and someday I will definitely make a movie on that.

Were you lonely?
Loneliness was never a problem because whenever I was lonely I would do something that would make me happy. My problem was that I had too many people around me and they never let me be alone.