“I was prepared for reactions and responses” – Sharmin Segal

Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar has indeed arrived as a global phenomenon in the OTT arena. While the show features some amazing performances, Sharmin Segal, who played Alamzaib, has been receiving mixed reviews for her role. However, this has not affected the actress at all, as she knows how to protect her mental health. She has been dealing with the feedback strongly and maturely.

In an interview Sharmin Segal was asked if the reactions from the audience had an impact on her mental health and how she deals with it. In response, she acknowledges that she signed up for it where she has to deal with different kinds of audiences. Not just negativity, the actress focuses on focusing the positive sides also. She said, “I’ve been working on my mental health for a very long time in my life now. It is just not throughout my acting life. It is something when you start understanding yourself better, it becomes a lot easier to realize that you live in a very vast world where people with a lot of opinions,”.

“I’ve chosen this profession to cater to an audience, so I was prepared for reactions and responses and there has been so much love also. Sometimes looking at the negativity, we tend to completely omit the positivity. Maybe the first few days it did. I just felt a little like uneasy, but after that it’s always a constant dialogue with yourself. You have thoughts, and then you think about those thoughts, judge, and that is what shapes morality and ethics.” she added.

She continued saying, “So basically you keep having that inner dialogue with your inner self, and then you pull yourself out even if you are down, but I don’t think it later affected me as much because you’ve to swift through it because there are people who are saying positive things also, and I can’t negate that only because those people have taken their time out to write good things about me and I can’t sudden fixate on somebody that has taken their time out to write negative things about me.”

“If it’s constructive, then yes I am very open to listening to it but if it’s not, then you’ve to focus on the amount of love. My DMs are filled with a lot of love. Negativity tends to be spoken about a lot more in public because people want to talk about negative things, but there is a lot of positivity also, like I need to embrace that as well,” she concluded.

Moreover, she also reflected on her views on the kind of negative backlash that she faced for her performance. Sharmin said, “I did put in a lot of hard work and at the end of the day, I gave it my all. But I gave it my all eventually to give it to my audience, and they do have the right to voice their opinions,”.

Helmed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, “Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar” is an eight-part series streaming across 190 countries on Netflix from May 1st.