MUMBAI: While she worked in Bollywood for years, actress Somy Ali, who now runs an NGO in the US called No More Tears, is not allowed to enter India. The actress, who works tirelessly to help the victims of domestic violence and rape, says that she has always missed India.
“My only crime is that I was born in Pakistan which is why I can’t enter India in spite of being a U.S. citizen. I can’t think of anything more unfair than this given how much I love and miss India and it is my favourite country in the entire world,” she says.
Talking about why she moved out of the country, she says, “I moved to America to get out of a violent household where domestic violence was a common and deemed to be completely normal whether it was our maids coming with bruises or my mother’s friends and my own mother. It was an extremely unhealthy environment for both my brother and myself. Therefore, I was in Miami at the age of eight or nine to move away from toxicity and pursue an education here.”
Ask her if she wants to make a comeback in Bollywood, and she says that it’s no easy feat. “As for wanting to make a comeback, as enticing as it sounds, unfortunately Sir Lord Mountbatten really messed things up for us leaving Kashmir and it’s inhabitants in limbo and causing a rift between Hindus and Muslims given the senseless loss of lives we lost during the partition in 1947. Here even in 2023, many of us are still facing the consequences of those senseless violent acts. Thus, one can’t come back when one is literally not allowed to come back to a country where her father and grandmother were born being Mumbai. This has to stop as it’s been over 70 years of this politically motivated stupidity by both sides,” she says.
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