03092026-LSTC-01.qxd 9/3/2026 12:05 AM Page 1 c m y b ORRY IN KHATRON KE KHILADI Orhan Awatramani, known has Orry, has revealed that he signed up for Khatron Ke Khiladi 15 without telling his parents. In a note shared alongside a reel of his stunt highlights on Instagram, he addressed host Rohit Shetty directly, "I came to this show completely alone. I didn't even tell my parents.” TRIBUNE Birthday girl Life Zendaya marked her 30th birthday with a childhood photo and a message of gratitude for her fans, continuing her tradition of sharing a throwback image to celebrate the occasion. CHANDIGARH | THURSDAY | 3 SEPTEMBER 2026 Tender, Actress Swara Bhasker clarifies Padmaavat remarks after social media backlash... Akhil Kumar AnshitaMehra For three years, Chandigarh-born artist Kanishka Puri has been looking closely at the relationship between femininity and the natural world. The result is a body of 27 photographs that brings together women, landscapes, plants and animals to examine ideas of care, power, knowledge and resistance. Titled The Wild The Tender, the exhibition draws from her encounters with women whose lives and labour are closely bound to nature. Among them are female lifeguards who read the changing moods of the sea, women farmers with an intimate understanding of soil, seeds and native plants, and forest protectors who care for both the land and communities dependent on it. Their relationship with nature, the artist observes, is not distant or merely visual. It is embodied knowledge, often inherited through generations and shaped by practices of observation, care, protection and survival. The photographs bring these relationships together through recurring motifs of flora, fauna, bodies and landscapes. At the heart of the work is a questioning of how both women and nature have historically been framed as objects to be observed, controlled, possessed or overlooked. A comment about Padmaavat, a jauhar sequence and the question of a woman’s right to survive has once again put Swara Bhasker at the centre of a social media debate. The actress has now clarified remarks she made at a recent Delhi event after a clip from her conversation began circulating online, with some social media users claiming she had called Rani Padmaavati and the women who committed jauhar “cowards”. Swara, however, said that was not what she meant. In a video shared on X on Tuesday, Swara explained that the comments were made during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” talk at the India International Centre on August 31. She was asked about the open letter she wrote to filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali after watching Padmaavat in 2018. “A clip of mine has been going viral on social media,” she said, explaining that her comments had been “completely mistranslated”. “Let me make it absolutely clear, I did not say that Rani Padmaavati or the other women in the palace were cowards,” she said. Her objection, she explained, was rooted in how such portrayals could be received by survivors of sexual violence. Speaking from the imagined perspective of a rape survivor, Swara questioned whether films should convey A woman’s purity more valuable than her life? the idea that a woman’s purity or honour is more valuable than her life. “This is the reality in our country. Should we make films that convey the message that a woman’s purity is more valuable than her life?” she asked. She further questioned whether a survivor should ever be made to feel that she would have been better off dead than alive after an assault. “Should we tell a rape survivor that it would have been better if she had died, and that surviving was a bad thing?” she said. The comments come nearly eight years after Swara’s open letter to Bhansali sparked its own conversation around Padmaavat. At the time, she criticised what she saw as the glorification of jauhar and questioned the message the film’s portrayal could send to women who survive sexual violence. At the Delhi event, she revisited the scene featuring Deepika Padukone as Rani Padmavati, in which hundreds of Rajput women enter the flames. For Swara, the sequence raised questions about whether women who survive sexual violence could be made to feel that they had somehow failed to protect their honour by choosing to live. One particular shot involving a pregnant woman, she recalled, had left her especially disturbed. “There was like one shot that c m y b made me so mad. I was like, ‘ Chhee!’ There is a close-up of a pregnant woman’s belly and she’s going...” she said, questioning the implication that a female foetus should not be born because she could one day face sexual violence. Swara also brought up the Nirbhaya case, saying the young woman should be remembered not only for the violence she endured but also for the will to live she displayed. She said society should never underestimate a woman’s desire to survive. With the issue once again spilling onto social media, Swara also pushed back, writing on X, “Gonna say it again… it is wild that so many women and men are triggered by the idea that rape survivors have the right to life after the horrible crime committed on them.” She also addressed the familiar perception that she is quick to react publicly, pointing out that she had not written her open letter immediately after watching Padmaavat. She said she waited five days before putting her thoughts on paper. presents both as dynamic and powerful forces, capable of resistance, adaptation and transformation. The photographs challenge familiar ideas of femininity associated primarily with motherhood, domesticity and nurture, while also asking whether care itself can be understood as a form of power. “I have photographed along the Arabian Sea in Goa, India’s first female lifeguards embodying the tension. I was associated with The Turtle Walker documentary when I was doing my internship there. The work of women in these coastlines is very significant as it requires courage and ability to respond to an environment that is constantly shifting,” says Kanishka. The women in the series emerge not merely as caretakers but as custodians of knowledge and active participants in sustaining the environment around them. In bringing together the wild and the tender, Kanishka’s work ultimately asks viewers to reconsider relationships that are often taken for granted between women and nature, care and power, vulnerability and strength. The exhibition does not offer easy answers. Instead, it invites a slower way of looking, one that recognises knowledge in lived experience and power in the ability to observe, adapt and endure. At Punjab Kala Bhawan, Sector 16. Concludes today. yet powerful Kanishka Puri’s photographs examine ideas of care, power, knowledge & resistance Rather than romanticising either the female body or the natural landscape, Kanishka