Aahana Kumra: I really had no time to recover from chikungunya

Actor Aahana Kumra isn’t letting chikungunya disrupt her work schedule, instead, she is getting better every passing day, in between her light, camera and action mode.

“I, recently, contracted chikungunya. I am doing fine now. But I really didn’t have time to recover, because I had to get on the set for a shoot on the sixth day after I was diagnosed,” Kumra tells us.

She continues, “It (getting diagnosed with chikungunya), was quite bad, but one has to work because I could not cancel any more days of shoot. I cancelled one day. And my producers were getting all worried, ke aur kitne days cancel karegi’”.

That’s when she made up her mind to return to work, as she shares, “Literally, I pushed myself, took all the antibiotics and got onto the set”.

“Our job is such that if it requires me to shoot for 16 hours, if it needs me to do action, I can’t really turn around and tell them, ‘I can’t do it’. The word I can’t do it, or this cannot be done will not happen for me,” admits the 36-year-old.

Her passion for the craft drives her to step out of her home, be it amid the pandemic, or on her days when she is feeling low.

“When I am working on a film set, I’m working with 300 people on a day to day basis, and they are literally around me, and the only people who don’t wear masks on a film set are actors. So, I feel we have to take that kind of risk, when it comes to working amid the pandemic,” she explains.

The actor continues, “That’s my living for the day. When I am on the set, I’m not worrying about if I’m being bitten by a mosquito or a bug or if I have Covid. The only thing you worry about is making sure that you get the shot right, and that the shooting is going on smoothly”.

And her hard work is paying off, as Kumra is getting noticed and appreciated for her projects, including her latest web series, Call My Agent: Bollywood, in which she plays a lesbian living her life on her own terms.

“My DMs have been full with people sending me a lot of love for the series, especially have been messaging me a lot of love from the LGBTQ community. In fact, the older generation has also loved it,” she says, adding that she was happy that the same-sex story line was not hyped up and hinged to stereotypical notions.

“It was a story of two individuals falling in love with each other. It was nice to be able to normalise it and humanise it. Also, I didn’t feel like I was doing anything different from what I otherwise do with another man,” concludes the actor, who is presently busy working on the second season of Avrodh.