Navjot Gulati’s Pooja Meri Jaan has arrived in the middle of a long-running Hindi cinema conversation about public judgment. The director says the film, starring Mrunal Thakur and Huma Qureshi, was written earlier than most viewers assume—and that a real media trial later gave it an unsettling second life.
Unlike the backlash that met Mrs (2025), Gulati says the reaction has been less contentious. Some viewers still concluded that the woman at the centre of the story was wrong. He insists the film is not arguing that women are always right; it is telling one story in which the woman is right, and another story could be different.
Written before the storm
The most striking clarification concerns the Rhea Chakraborty case. Gulati says he began writing in April 2020, before that media storm began. When it did unfold, he watched it closely. In his words, “the witch hunt against her was wrong at every level.” The script was already on the page, but he took notes as the life he had imagined started playing out in real time.
Why the film still feels current
Pooja Meri Jaan was shot in 32 days across Delhi-NCR in 2022. Gulati says the delay has not dated the film; a viewer unaware of its shoot schedule could easily assume it was made this year. The reason is not comforting: the subject has only become more relevant. He had earlier voiced disappointment with Maddock Films, but now prefers to keep attention on the film itself rather than the journey to release.
That is a useful framing for a film like this: the conversation it starts matters more than the noise around it. Gulati cites a concrete outcome:
- a friend’s sister had been harassed for four years;
- after watching the film, she told her brother what she had been through;
- the family filed a police complaint.
For Gulati, that real-world action outweighs a handful of objections online.
A collaborator with a different lens
Gulati co-wrote the film with Kanishka, a friend he brought in for a female perspective. He is candid that he once understood the story more from the pursuer Aniket’s side—a character played by Vikram Singh Chauhan—and that the collaboration helped him write Pooja properly. Thakur, he says, then took the character further.
What comes next
Badtameez Gill, starring Vaani Kapoor, Aparshakti Khurana and Paresh Rawal, is planned as a conscious departure—a fun film expected early next year. Gulati says he is done with wedding comedies and is now casting a dark comedy about news channels, with casting expected by the end of the year.
Source: bollywoodHungama.com
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