Radhika Bhirani (HINDUSTAN TIMES; April 17, 2020)

There are workout, cooking, DIY videos galore from celebs amid the lockdown. But actor Yami Gautam is harnessing the power of the homemade by creating scrubs, gluten-free bread, pahadi cuisine, oil and more at home. “For anything that I’m doing, I’m not putting out a tutorial. I don’t any feel the need to do that. Everything’s available on YouTube,” she says.

Emphasising that “we’re locked down for a very serious reason”, she says once the lockdown ends, people can’t behave like they used to as kids — “Arre, school se chhuti mil gayi, now we can run out”. “There’s nothing to celebrate. We’ve just got to be grateful for the privileges we have,” adds the 31-year-old, who believes that helping the underprivileged is something everyone must do.

The Coronavirus lockdown has come as a breather for the actor, for whom year 2019 was professionally fruitful, but personally “hard on health”.

“This (pause) has given me a very good amount of time to heal myself as much as I can inside out, and to just relax the mind and body,” says Gautam.

A glimpse at her social media page tells you what she’s really up to, and it includes a lot of homemade items. She explains, “Just because things are easily available to us, it never occurs to us that we should create something out of things at home.”