The men beside me during Peddi explain why Janhvi is hyper-sexualised in the film

I watched Peddi alone, and the two men beside me kept laughing through Janhvi Kapoor's scenes while invading my space. If this is how some people react in a theatre, maybe it's time we questioned what we're normalising on screen.

In Short

• I went to watch Peddi in theatres on Sunday, and the men there proved something right
• Women constantly defend their space from casual invasion
• Objectification in films impacts real-world behaviour towards women

What do you actually mean when you say you need a safe space?

It is a phrase we throw around constantly, but let us stop and strip away the academic jargon. This isn’t a soft, polite question meant only for women to debate amongst themselves. It is a fundamental question that every single one of us needs to answer, regardless of who we are. Regardless of gender.

To me, a safe space isn’t some abstract, grand concept. It is something incredibly small and remarkably simple. It is the modest, invisible perimeter that my own body occupies when I walk down a street, sit in a restaurant, or look for a seat in a cinema. It is the simple freedom to just be in a public area without my boundaries being quietly, casually eroded.

Yet, as women, we are forced to defend this tiny territory every single day.

This whole conversation matters because of Janhvi Kapoor – and the absolute waste of her talent in the Telugu film Peddi. What director Buchi Babu Sana does to her on that screen is frustrating, but we’ll get to the cinema mechanics in a minute. First, you need to understand how this onscreen nonsense directly bleeds into our actual lives.

Take what happened to me a few months ago. I was flying back to my hometown. Because of a chaotic, last-minute booking, I missed out on the window and the aisle. I ended up with the dreaded middle seat. If you have ever travelled solo as a woman, you already know the specific type of anxiety this brings. On either side of me sat a man.

The flight started well enough, and I was daydreaming about seeing my parents. But within thirty minutes, I noticed a sharp, nagging pain. My legs were locked in a tight, unnatural position and my glutes had completely cramped up. Why? Because the men on both sides had seamlessly colonised my space. One had drifted off to sleep, totally unaware of the physical discomfort he was causing me. The other was completely glued to his phone, happily watching Mastiii 4, a crude Hindi sex comedy (I lost it here). I actually snapped a quick photo to send to my sister later, a silent receipt of how women are routinely expected to shrink themselves just to exist in public.

That brings me directly to last Sunday, and why the current conversation around the hyper-sexualisation of women on our cinema screens matters so desperately out here in the real world.

I went to watch director Buchi Babu Sana’s new Telugu sports drama, Peddi, starring Ram Charan. Because I wanted to catch the film in its original language, I deliberately chose a quiet, 10:00 AM morning show, assuming the theatre would be mostly empty. I had run a brisk 3k earlier that morning. I felt energised, pumped, and ready for a good theatrical experience. I had even managed to book the absolute best seat in the house, and to my delight, the entire row was empty when I arrived. The theatre was at barely 15 per cent capacity – just a few couples, a handful of solo film buffs, and a single family.

Then, ten minutes into the movie, two men walked up the aisle.

I watched them enter, silently crossing my fingers and praying they weren’t heading towards me. No such luck. They took the seats right next to mine, and the peaceful illusion of my morning completely dissolved. Almost instantly, the man directly beside me began violating my personal space. I am certain he did not do it maliciously. The uncomfortable truth is that men are rarely taught what a safe space even means. They are barely aware, conscious.

Think about it. From the time a girl is three years old, she is given a strict, lifetime syllabus on how to exist. We are taught how to sit, how to walk, how to speak, and how to constantly monitor our presence in public so we do not invite the wrong kind of attention. But are boys ever given the same lecture? Are they taught how to behave when a woman is in their vicinity? Are they trained to ensure she feels she has an equal, undeniable right to the physical space she paid for?

Hardly. And so, this man sat with his legs wide open, his left elbow and forearm hovering well past my armrest, drifting directly into my seat. I had to pull my legs in, contort my posture, and sit under total tension. I spent the entire first half tracking his movements out of the corner of my eye in the dark.

I had just about managed to lean away as far as my seat would allow when Janhvi Kapoor’s character, Achiyamma, entered the frame.

By now, anyone following Indian cinema is well aware of the massive online row surrounding how her character is framed in this movie. But witnessing it happen in a dark room full of strangers is a different story altogether. The moment she appeared on screen, a wave of distinct, knowing giggles broke out right beside me. The crude, unfiltered commentary that you usually find in the dark corners of a YouTube comment section suddenly became loud, real-world dialogue.

And looking at the screen, can we really blame the audience for reacting that way?

For a vast portion of the film, the camera treats Kapoor’s character with a jarring level of objectification. It routinely refuses to travel above her neck. Entire sequences are constructed around lingering, close-up shots of her midriff or her chest. It feels as though the director Buchi Babu Sana’s explicit instruction to the cinematographer was to find the most fragmented, reductive frame possible and just hold it there.

This visual choice perfectly mirrors a deeply problematic line in the script, where Ram Charan’s character Peddi casually tells his friend that he just wants to touch Achiyamma without her consent while she is out political campaigning, because that is the only way he knows how to express his love. When that happened, the men sitting next to me shared a sharp, cynical laugh.

I know what does that specific laugh mean? It is the sound of an audience recognising a classic cinematic trick.

Later in the film, when her character marries Peddi, the movie attempts a sudden, jarring shift in tone. She appears in a neatly draped, traditional cotton saree, and the camera finally, generously decides to look at her face.

It is the realisation that the filmmaker has spent the last hour using a woman's body as a commercial magnet, only to suddenly ask us to respect her character the moment she becomes a wife.

This is the toxic, profitable loop that modern filmmakers and audiences have built together. Directors argue they are simply giving the masses the "masala" elements they crave to secure a massive box-office opening. Meanwhile, audiences consume these images, internalising the idea that a woman’s body is a public commodity meant to be stared at, picked apart, and commented upon.

How can we expect men to respect the boundaries of a real, living woman sitting next to them in the dark, when the giant screen in front of them is actively teaching them that a woman’s boundaries are completely optional?

The casual invasion of a woman’s space – whether it is an oversized elbow on a flight or a man-sprawled posture in a cinema row – does not happen by accident. It is nurtured and legitimised by a film industry that continues to reduce women to visual props for cheap entertainment.

Yes, following severe public backlash, the makers of Peddi have claimed that they deleted some of the most egregious shots from the film. But the fact that these scenes were written, shot, edited, and celebrated in the first place proves how deep the rot goes in 2026.

This cycle has to stop. It is no longer acceptable to excuse blatant objectification as harmless mass entertainment. And no, it isn't just lazy filmmaking; it has real-world consequences for every woman trying to navigate a public space.

And filmmakers need to find better ways to entertain without compromising the dignity of their female actors. At the same time, audiences need to look at their own reactions in the dark and ask themselves why they find the reduction of a woman so incredibly amusing.

Until both sides take real accountability, the cinema will remain exactly what it felt like to me last Sunday: just another space where women are forced to shrink themselves down just to feel safe.

- Ends