Kaifi & I

Longtime commenter and friend of SLP Sally reminded me that Shaukat Kaifi's memoir, Kaifi aur Main, has now been published in an English translation. As much as I'd love to read the book in Urdu, I allowed myself a moment of realism and bought a copy of the translation.

It arrived today, and I'll make posts about it here as I read it.

Oh, and in case you are new to SLP or to Shabana Azmi, let me be less cryptic - Shaukat Kaifi is Shabana Azmi's mother; the book is reminiscence about life with Kaifi Azmi, Shabana ji's father. The blurb from Amartya Sen on the back of the book says: "They were united not only by love and marriage, but also by an individually assessed joint commitment to social change, artistic creativity, and personal and political ethics. In this excellent translation we have a lively account of an important part of Indian history...."

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!

Shabana Azmi's columns in *Harmony*

In a democracy, people need to become active participants, not passive recipients of government policy.

-- Shabana Azmi

Source: This column which Shabana ji wrote for Harmony magazine in 2004. I have to send a hearty thanks to SLP reader fadista di mouraria for bringing these wonderful columns to my attention. Harmony magazine is the publication of the Harmony for Silvers Foundation, which is an NGO dedicated to improving the lives of India's senior citizens. The foundation's mission is "to create an environment where silvers, irrespective of their cultural beliefs, can retain their dignity, self-respect, pride and self-confidence."

The foundation's website features about fifteen brief pieces that Shabana Azmi wrote for the magazine between 2004 and early 2007, in which she urges seniors not to be complacent, not to settle for less than their due rights and respect. She encourages seniors toward grass-roots mobilization, taking advantage of their leisure time and connections:

A positive force that can bring about revolution, senior citizens have so much in their favor. To begin with, they have the time. There's also the tenacity and perseverance that come with age and wisdom to see projects through. They know that impatience won't get them anywhere. The youth, with all their energy, are no match for the elderly as they lose patience easily and may take the easy route out. Not seniors. For them, the harder, the better.

(She writes with awareness that the readership of the publication, which is in English, is educated and middle-class.) In one column she holds up the powerful US lobbying organization AARP as an example of what mobilized seniors can achieve, and suggests that there is a need for an Indian organization to step up to that level.

In addition to her calls to activism, some of the columns are touchingly personal, including anecdotes about her mother and other elderly people close to her heart; I particularly liked this one about her mother (in which she calls herself a "spunky lass"). I also liked this one, in which she talks about several elderly people who inspire her. In this column, she describes rushing to help and elderly man struggling to get down the stairs in a train station. Can you imagine a movie star helping a stranger in a train station? If I weren't already completely in love with this woman before, I would be now.

These articles are lovely, just a wonderful find.

Shabana and her amma

The December poll pitting amma against beti is almost over - please have a vote if you have not yet. In the meantime, here is some more about mother and daughter. First, a reader sent in this sweet and lovely picture of them.



And Rohinik, from the BollyWHAT? discussion forum, offers the following tale:

Shabana and her mother would get into spats at times and wouldn't speak to each other. Whoever wanted to make up with the other would leave a champa (type of flower) at each other's door. Even fights were poetic at their house!

2002 Interview - from AsiaSource

I'm sorry to be so buried with work that I can't give you something new to look at or think about every day.

As a quickie, here is a 2002 interview from AsiaSource which some of you have certainly seen before. It was the first interview of Shabana Azmi I ever read, and it very much made me sit up and take notice: this is a person I want to pay attention to. It covers much of the usual ground - the commitment to social change that permeated the household of Kaifi Azmi, the turning point of Arth, the promise of the independent voice of women in government, and so on - but as always it's a good read. One thing that comes through, I think, and that I particularly love about Shabana ji, is her optimism. She is a serious and committed person but she is never a downer - she always speaks with hope for a better future, whether it's the future of Indian cinema or the future of India.

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.

"The Beat" brief video interview

On a television show called The Beat, Shabana Azmi describes, in two minutes, how she was shaped by growing up in Kaifi and Shaukat's household and playing socially charged roles. Once again, there's nothing really new here, but do you ever tire of watching these little clips? I don't.

An intimate interview

Thanks so much to SLP reader fadista da mouraria who sent me a rich collection of interviews and articles about Shabana Azmi. Some of them I have seen before, but others are new to me, and they will provide material here for weeks to come.

Today I begin with a set of reminscences so intimate that it made my eyes moist. In this 2004 interview, Shabana ji ventures into some intensely personal topics. The interview begins with some anecdotes from childhood that I've heard before, but then turns to subjects that had for me previously only been matters of speculation. I feel grateful to Shabana ji for offering this window into aspects of her life that are none of my business and yet irresistably fascinating to me.

There's some fun stuff in there too. This made me smile and smile:

I had a crush on Shashi Kapoor: Shashi and Jennifer were family friends. Prithviraj Kapoor lived next door to my parents' house and, every Sunday, when Shashi visited his father, I would buy a Re-1 photo of Shashi and get him to sign it. When I was selected to act with him in Fakira, I panicked — he was my big hero!

Well, one could do worse than have a crush on the beautiful Shashi Kapoor. I wrote here about Fakira just the other day. In it Shabana ji's character Neeta or Geeta (depending upon when you ask her) is a police inspector who plans to catch the vigilante bandit Fakira, played by Shashi, by going undercover and pretending to fall in love with him; it turns out she can't control her emotions as well as she hoped. It must have been a fun and overwhelming role for Shabana ji to play, at just 24 or 25 years old, a romantic lead opposite her childhood hero.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Inauspicious debut

From a wonderful interview published in Little India magazine earlier this year, Shabana Azmi's first performance as an actor:

Well actually my acting career started and didn't quite take off at the age of three. I was enacting the nursery rhyme "Hey diddle diddle the cat and the fiddle/ the cow went over the Moon." I was playing the cow. Alas. instead of going over the moon I fell on the moon, who was another three-year-old girl. She got up and gave me a tight slap. I slapped her in return and the curtains had to be brought down hastily!

Read the rest of the interview here.