This is the best time to be a woman.” So said Kangana Ranaut in Parliament when she spoke on the Women’s Reservation Bill in April. Gender is the flavour of the electoral season, a woman’s vote stronger than ever before, the rush to appease her more blatant.

This societal mood has seeped into cinema. So, from a Shabana Azmi-led Dabba Cartel to Madhuri Dixit’s Maa Behen on Netflix, all shades of women are being served for consumption. There is also a marked leaning towards service above self with the backdrop of an authentic, flesh-and-blood event.

Combine all three — gender, service, real life — and you get films like Mission Mangal (2019) and The Vaccine War (2023) in which women battle odds at home and the workplace to achieve something for the country. The film on our space mission, where Akshay Kumar shared space with Vidya Balan, Sonakshi Sinha and Taapsee Pannu, succeeded like a Chandrayaan 3 landing. But, led by Nana Patekar, the race against time to make our own vaccine along with Pallavi Joshi, Girija Oak, Raima Sen and a force of strong, dedicated women workers, sank.

One has no clue if Kangana’s Bharat Bhhagya Viddhaata on the nurses of Cama Hospital on the night of 26/11 will soar or sink but it has the template of gender+service+real life. That power was evident at the trailer launch of BBV where Kangana owned the stage “like a man”.

Ranveer Singh did it at the trailer launch of Dhurandhar, and at the unveiling of a desi Chinese ad campaign. His effusive introduction of the team made him practically transform from lead actor to co-host of these events.

We’ve seen Varun Dhawan do it. You may call him a confused blend of Salman and Govinda, and films like Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari may have fallen flat, but it was he who brought high-energy entertainment to the trailer launch of SSKTK.

We’ve seen Abhishek Bachchan do it, sprinting to hand a mike to someone at the Housefull 5 trailer launch and enlivening a Raja Shivaji event.

But curiously, you don’t see even substantial actress Vidya Balan captain an event the way Kangana did, without coming off as imperious. She had the Ranveer quality of being commanding in an endearing way, making the afternoon more about applauding the workforce of women across the board than about herself or her film.

Considered a loose cannon by many, Kangana is like Jaya Bachchan and Smriti Irani, a performer who can deliver a well-written script. You may not like what Kangana represents. But inescapable is the growth story of an eternal learner, from a girl once taken advantage of to a 40-year-old single woman who can shape a discussion.

At a time when Netflix’s PR team disallowed Madhuri and the Maa Behen team from answering an out-of-syllabus question on Ranveer, Kangana smartly took it and compared it to her own story — the higher you rise, the more the attempts to pull you down.

Incidentally, when the Ranveer-Farhan standoff is about market forces, how did it turn into a communal Khan-Akhtar assault on a “Sanghi Singh”? In fact, Javed Akhtar has been all praise for Dhurandhar; Farhan himself has never been present at any press conference called by any film body.

By the way, Farhan was at Pahlaj Nihalani’s house on Thursday morning before the latter was taken to the crematorium — few know that Pahlaj’s son Vicky works with Akhtar’s Excel Entertainment.

When I visited Pahlaj last month in a hospital, he was his cheerful self, although clearly in distress. Farewell to the producer who launched Govinda and Chunky, was a family friend to Yashwant Sinha, Shatrughan Sinha, the Deols and more. To the controversial CBFC chairman who always drove his own car and picked up his phone at any hour, Om Shanti.

Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and an author