Shabana Azmi news roundup

Please forgive me another roundup post. Real life has seemed busier than usual the last several days, and there's lots and lots of news; I can't keep up with it all.

• Shabana ji has been at the U.N. General Assembly protesting with ActionAid's HungerFREE campaign. "It’s time we took starvation seriously — one out of every four Indians is dying of hunger," she says. "These are startling facts. Everyone looks at these as cold statistics, but we want to make them emotive issues. We want to ask people how they’d feel if their child or parent went to bed hungry." (Source.) India e-news has a few more words about that, along with some of the other stuff Shabana ji is up to these days - home remodeling (me too!), going to the movies for her birthday, talking to the BBC.

• More from the internet stalking headquarters: After the stop at the U.N., Shabana ji is heading to Yale for a conference on India's Future and Women's Global Leadership.
  

• Loins of Punjab Presents opened in India late last week. The cast and crew attended a premiere in Juhu, the Mumbai suburb where Shabana ji lives. Here's Shabana ji with Javed sahib and the kids, Farhan and Zoya -
  

Sweet family! (Here are more pictures from the premiere.) The film has gotten some nice reviews, like this one from Baradwaj Rangan, who recently won a National Award for film journalism. There are lots and lots of articles and reviews since the movie opened, but I haven't read many of them - I don't want to know too much more about the movie before I see it - so no more links. You can read what Manish Acharya himself has to say about it, though, here.

• Not much to say about this nice little biographic piece from Glamsham, but it's a pleasant read.

• And finally, Here's a year-old note (that for some reason just turned up in the news search) about a BBC TV production Shabana ji did last year called Banglatown Banquet. I always thought this sounded like an interesting project and I'd like to see it some time.