News about *It's a Wonderful Afterlife*

Hello folks! Some of you might have noticed I've posted a few reviews at Filmi Geek in the last couple of weeks. I am still getting into the flow of my new job and still trying to balance the various interests tugging on my time, so I don't want to promise too much and then fail to deliver. That's why I haven't tried to return to a regular posting schedule here.

However: this was too interesting not to share, and maybe it's the kick-start I need to get back to glancing at the news about Shabana Azmi every day and sharing the best of it with you.

Some of you probably know that Shabana ji is working on a film with director Gurinder Chadha (who made Bend It Like Beckham, among others). The new film is called It's a Wonderful Afterlife. I've been alerted to a Live Journal page carrying an IBN piece on the film, which includes short clips of interviews with Ms. Chadha and Shabana ji, among others. The movie looks very funny; I'm looking forward to finding out more, and looking forward also to Shabana ji being in a film that is sure to find wide art-house distribution and buzz in the U.S.

Click here to load the page and watch the video. And thanks to Gauri at BollyWHAT for the heads-up.

Incidentally that Live Journal page seems to for fans of Sendhil Ramamurthy, the good-looking fellow who plays the irredeemably stupid Mohinder Suresh in the television series Heroes. It will be interesting to see how he'll do sharing the screen with Shabana ji.

"Halke halke," Apne paraye (1980)

Our first post-hiatus Shabana-gaana is a pretty song from Basu Chatterjee's 1980 film Apne paraye. I have had this film in my collection for ages but still have not got round to watching it.

The song is sung competently by Lata Mangeshkar but I don't find her a great match for Shabana Azmi, who by the way looks completely lovely in the song.

The video is not embeddable so click here to watch it on YouTube.

Metapost - Geek of a new trade

I am so sorry for the extended posting hiatus here and at my other two blogs, Filmi Geek and Geek of all Trades. The past half-year or so has been trying for me, with lots of soul-searching and thinking and introspection. I had to let something go, to have the energy for all that, and it was the blogs that suffered. For you, SLP readers, that meant I wasn't able to keep up with the latest news about Shabana Azmi, collect screencaps, or post random musings about our favorite excellent woman.

The good news is that I have decided to say goodbye to my career as a patent attorney, and in a little over a month I will be starting a new career and a new job as a technical writer.

I don't know exactly what the future holds, but I miss Shabana Azmi and I miss blogging and I will definitely be back. So please stay tuned for postings soon, as I turn the page on my professional life and, with any luck, get back some of the energy I used to spend here thinking and writing and communicating with all you folks out there.

Thanks for reading, and I'm looking forward to getting back in touch with all of you.

Birthday wishes

I have not forgotten Shabana Azmi's birthday.



Warmest birthday wishes to the great lady, who turns 58 today.

I have not forgotten you, either, the readers of SLP. I've just been very, very tired and have had to cut back on the extracurriculars for a while as I work through some things. I would like to keep up with the news of Shabana ji and keep you all posted as well. But for the last couple of months the energy to do that simply hasn't been there. I will try to get back to a more regular posting schedule soon. In the meantime, please bear with me, accept my apologies, and read my comments on Loins of Punjab Presents, which I finally got to see last weekend.

Loins of Punjab Presents finally on U.S. screens

It's been a long, long wait - nearly a year - but Manish Vij over at Ultrabrown reports that Manish Acharya's Loins of Punjab Presents ... is finally seeing a (limited) U.S. theatrical release.

Manish says the film, a screwball and very original comedy about a small-time desi talent contest in New Jersey starring Shabana Azmi, Ajay Naidu, and a bunch of other talented folks, will open September 12th on two screens in New York, and will later show in the San Francisco bay area, Chicago, and a few other cities.

I hope that if it does well it can be picked up for an even wider distribution. There are at least two art houses in metro Boston where it would fit right in to the usual program. But I am not going to wait to find out; I think I'll be heading to New York for that opening weekend. It's absurd that I have still not seen this movie.

Starstruck

The first real star I met as a journalist was Shabana Azmi. Long before meeting her I idolised her. As a rookie I still remember how fast my heart pounded as I sat wide-eyed in the portico of her beautiful house in Janki Kutir, waiting for her to emerge from inside. When she eventually did in a chic salwar-kameez, her hair falling to her shoulder and her eyes penetrating into a horizon far beyond human vision, time just froze.

-- Subhash K. Jha.

Source: An edition of Jha's Times of India column from a few weeks ago. I'm not a big fan of Jha - he's an inveterate name-dropper, and this particular article seems to have no other purpose - but these comments struck me; I think all of us who idolize Shabana ji can sympathize. I'm sure that once time started moving again for Mr. Jha, he was able to do the business he went to her house to do, and to leave with a good interview for his editor. When I met Shabana Azmi, though - it's still only been the one time - I lost my tongue, and was unable to make any impression on her whatsoever. I hope I'll be able to keep my head a bit better, next time.

Priorities in order

TV shows extremes – either the women will be as good as gold or wicked as the Devil. When somebody tells me that women are being portrayed in the bad light or as subservient, I consider it far more objectionable than women dressing up skimpily and celebrating their sexuality.

-- Shabana Azmi

Source: This article about Shabana ji's role in Ekta Kapoor's "Kaun jeetega Bollywood ka ticket," which I mentioned here not long ago. Shabana ji astutely touches upon a very important point. To object to the portrayal of women as human beings with autonomous sexuality is to perpetuate the dichotomy that is described in Western culture as the Madonna-whore problem. It shows in Shabana ji's body of work (among other things) that she recognizes the importance of a woman's freedom to express her own sexuality as she chooses, and that a dramatic portrayal of a woman doing so is not automatically cheap, improper, or objectionable.

Gratuitous screencaps: Main Azaad hoon (1989)

Marbs and Sally aced the trivia question I posted the other day: the two movies that Javed Akhtar wrote and Shabana Azmi starred in were Jhoothi shaan and the subject of today's gratuitous screencaps, Main Azaad hoon.

Main Azaad hoon is, to my knowledge, the only movie in which Shabana Azmi starred opposite Amitabh Bachchan. It was a pretty good movie - I have a half-written review which will be posted at Filmi Geek some time in the next couple of days. Until then, here are the screencaps.



















(I doctored that one - the print I watched had dreadful color in some scenes)

Trivia: Written just for her

It seemed like a nice time for another installment of SLP's semi-regular trivia feature.

Should Shabana Azmi ever retire from the movies, I have a fantasy about her final film. My fantasy is that Javed Akhtar will write a script just for Shabana ji and she will win her sixth National Film Award for the role.

As it happens, Javed Akhtar considers himself rather a man's scriptwriter, and probably has no tour-de-force role for his wife lurking, as yet unwritten, in his pen. He has, however, written two films (that I know of) in which Shabana ji has starred. Can you name them?

Here is a hint:



This is a screencap from one of them, which I watched last week; the review will be going up at Filmi Geek in a couple of days, followed by more screencaps here.

Video interview "Cover Story"

Great thanks to reader Mihiri who left me this fabulous link in a comment a couple of weeks ago; it slipped off my radar screen somehow (Blogger handles comments somewhat inelegantly) and I missed it until quite recently.

What it is: a lovely video interview of Shabana Azmi from about four years ago, by Vir Sanghvi for (what I presume is) a television show called Cover Story. In the twenty-minute interview Shabana ji sings a Carnatic swaram, and discusses the difference between commercial acting and art-cinema acting, the Stanislavski method, why she became a film actor, being afraid to smile, why she decided to join a hunger strike for the rights of displaced slum-dwellers, and why she has refused to join any political party, among other things.

My favorite part of the interview is a story that is both about Shabana ji and about her parents. In 1986, Shabana Azmi joined her famous first hunger strike for Nivara Haq, an organization devoted to fighting for slum-dwellers whose homes are destroyed by government and private development, because she felt it was useless for her to lend her voice to the organization if she was not also prepared to go the distance demonstrating with them. It was a decision she made from the heart, quite risky for her career and her public perception, but she believed it was the right thing to do. Government officials tried to convince her mother, Shaukat Kaifi, to stop her, but Shaukat would not. Still, Shaukat was concerned for her daughter's well-being, and when Shabana ji's hunger strike was five days old, she sent a telegram to Shabana's father, Kaifi Azmi, who was then away in Patna. She's getting sick, Shaukat said, what can I do? Please talk some sense into her. Kaifi's response: "Best of luck, comrade."

You can watch the video here. (A note: I was only able to play the video in Internet Explorer; the player interacted poorly with my ad-blocker in Firefox.) And thanks again to Mihiri!