This week's Shabana-gaana is from Atithee (1978), a movie I have not seen.
"Rang birange nazaare" is a nice enough duet, though I have to admit that Shabana ji's performance in the song is fairly generic and uninspired. Songs like this really don't play to her strengths, even this early in her career when she frequently played the masala heroine. She did better hamming it up in the funny songs in Parvarish.
The real question this video raises is: Why did the costume designer helmet Shashi with such a terrible wig, when he has such gorgeous natural curls?
A quiet few weeks here as my real life once again drags me away from the blog. I am 2/3 of the way through Kaifi & I and have a few things to say about it when I get time.
I managed to watch Basu Chatterjee's 1980 film Apne paraye, which stars Shabana Azmi with Amol Palekar, Utpal Dutt, Girish Karnad, and a few others. I'll review it on Filmi Geek soon. In the meantime, it provides a Shabana-gaana for us, this sweet and sad lullaby "Halke halke aai chalke."
I saw this press release the other day that reported Shabana Azmi taking enthusiastic part in a book launch for "well-known homeopath Dr. Mukesh Batra." (I have shamelessly cropped Dr. Batra and others out of the above picture; please follow the link to see it.) Shabana ji said at the event that she believes in homeopathy, and praised Dr. Batra for helping relieve her pain and speeding the healing when she suffered a leg fracture. She also credited him for her beautiful skin.
The press release gave me pause. To me, the word "homeopathy" refers to the use of hyper-dilute "solutions" in which nothing is left of any active ingredient other than some mystical molecular memory. I believe this is utter quackery, snake oil of the lowest order. It includes such arrant nonsense as the claim that these solutions become more effective as they become more dilute. In short, I think it's rubbish, and that purveyors of it should be prosecuted, not praised.
But I did some research before sitting down to write this post, because I know that the term "homeopathy" has a broader usage as well, that refers to a wider variety of what we in the West sometimes call "alternative" medicine, natural medicine, or holistic medicine. That is far too broad of a scope for me (even as a fairly narrow-minded rationalist) to dismiss out of hand. Reading the press release, it sounds to me like Shabana ji, Dr. Batra, and his book are using the word in this broader sense. I did a sanity check with an Indian friend of mine, who also understood the word that way (and spoke very highly of her own experience with practitioners).
If Shabana ji believes that she has been helped by such natural and holistic remedies, I have no quibble with that, and no concern for either her good sense or her well-being. I would worry about someone who would reject scientifically-developed treatments for serious ailments - I wouldn't mess around with cancer, for example - but for pain remedies, or mild stimulation, or treating cold symptoms and the like, I can readily believe that natural remedies are often as effective (if not more so in some cases) than pharmaceuticals. So, it was just the term "homeopathy" - its two very different meanings - that threw me in this case.
This video puff piece has some more about Shabana ji's relationship with Dr. Batra, and some clips of both Shabana ji and Javed Akhtar looking wonderful.
Remember the Shabana-gaana feature? Back when I used to update Sounds Like Power obsessively, I reserved Fridays for interesting (for better or worse) song picturizations featuring Shabana Azmi.
This week the feature returns with "Jaan ab ja rahi hai," a qawwali from the 1977 movie Khel khilari ka. I'd never heard of this film before and assume that it's thoroughly forgettable - but the song itself is not half bad. I don't care much for Shabana ji's outfit - there seemed in this era to be a lot of dressing tawaifs and female qawwals in Pepto-Bismol colored suits -but she handles herself with reasonable competence, doing something much closer to real dancing than you usually see from her.
I am not sure who all the men are who join her partway through the song - the video quality is too poor for me to tell for sure. I am pretty sure I spotted Shakti Kapoor. And, with the help of Memsaab's incredible resource, the Artist Gallery, I confidently identified a fellow named Dhruv, whom to my knowledge I have never seen before.
Another video for you today as I continue to catch up. This is not a new piece - it's an IBN interview from 2008 - but I hadn't seen it before.
In the interview, Shabana Azmi talks about Muslim identity India. She notes that Indian Muslims are in a relatively good position, compared to Muslims in other parts of the world, because they are stakeholders in a democracy, and there are prominent Muslims in many walks of life (for example, movies and politics) that can serve as role models.
I don't feel qualified to judge whether I agree or disagree with Shabana ji's statements here. What do you think?
"Every time you make a statement about India, the opposite is also true."
-- Shabana Azmi
Catching up on Shabana Azmi news I missed during my hiatus, I have come across quite a few newer videos that I'll pass along here, on the off chance anyone is reading. Back in April, Shabana ji gave an English-language interview to Al Jazeera, which you can watch here on YouTube.
The interview doesn't cover any new ground, if you are a long-time Shabanaficionado like myself. The interviewer asks easy questions that allow her to trot out her well-rehearsed lines - about art being an instrument for social change, about India living in several centuries simultaneously, about only seeing Javed sahib in airports, and other familiar topics.
Still, it's enjoyable to watch, especially to me as a sort of re-introduction after not hearing Shabana ji's voice on a regular basis for so long. Toward the end, she does make some interesting comments about religion and tolerance. And the video opens with some charming pictures of Shabana as a young girl, including this one that I'd never seen before:
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.
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.
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.
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!
In fact my husband complains that I've done a kissing scene with a man in another movie and I don't look as convincing as I do with Nandita [Das], and he wants to know what that's all about.
-- Shabana Azmi
Source: a fab interview posted here on the BollyWHAT? forum; I don't have the original source, but the interview is probably about 4 years old.
This comment made me spit out my coffee the first time I read it and still tickles me. But I've always wondered, what movie does it refer to? I didn't think it was this, from Fakira...
... because as cute and tasty as that is, the screencap is actually a little misleading; this kiss happens as the two actors are turning away from the camera and, in motion, is really more of a Bollywood-ishtyle simulacrum of a kiss than it looks in the still.
Well I have, by the wonderful magic of YouTube, accidentally stumbled upon the following, which is probably the scene Shabana ji was talking about in the above-quoted remark. Hold onto your socks, folks; wait for the second half of the clip.
Oh my! That is from the 1992 British film with the unpromising title Immaculate Conception, a film about which I know absolutely nothing. Have any of you seen it? At any rate, as startling as the clip is, I am inclined to agree with Javed sahib: Fire was more convincing.
Today's Shabana-gaana is "Tum se roshan hai" from the 1984 film Lorie. The song features Shabana Azmi looking particularly lovely and Farooq Shaikh looking particularly fuzzy.
Lorie is also the answer to SLP's first trivia question, which I posted last week. The question was: Name a film to which three Azmis contributed their talents.Lorie featured Shabana ji in a starring role, Shabana ji's mother Shaukat Kaifi in a supporting role, and Shabana ji's brother Baba Azmi, behind the camera as cinematographer. I haven't yet seen this film so I can't say much more about it.
Thanks to a great SLP reader - you know who you are - for the trivia question and the song clip.
Thanks to HemaMalini at the BollyWHAT forum (not that Hema Malini :) for bringing this spectacular video series to my attention. It is a history of filmi music, narrated by Shabana Azmi. The first segment is embedded below.
There are 14 segments altogether! Here is a link to a search that should help you find all of them.
Judging by Shabana ji's appearance in this video (screencap below) I'd say this was shot in the early 1980s; I have not yet watched the whole series and the date may become more obvious later on. The Hindi narration is very good practice for me, as Shabana ji's diction is slow and clear, but it would take me hours upon hours to thoroughly translate and transcribe all of the text in all 14 segments so I am afraid you are on your own.
Last weekend I saw an absolutely outstanding concert by Zakir Hussain - it was the fourth or fifth time I've seen him and let me tell you, if you ever have the chance to see him, just drop everything and go. Anyhow in light of that wonderful experience it seemed appropriate that the first post-hiatus Shabana-gaana should be "Kya tumne hai keh diya" from Sai Paranjpe's Saaz - featuring both Shabana Azmi and Zakir sahib. I've not seen this movie yet but I've got it in my collection, and as Sai Paranjpe is well on her way to becoming one of my favorite directors, I'm sure I'll watch it in the near future. Enjoy the song.
I mentioned in my previous post that Shabana Azmi is not talking about whether there is a Benazir Bhutto bio-pic in the works. Here is a nice little Reuters video on that subject. Thanks to fadista di mouraria and the other readers who brought it to my attention.
The video also mentions Shabana ji's rumored association with a film about the founding of Bangladesh, a rumor Shabana ji denies. "I have no idea," she says; "I heard about it on television like all of you did."
Thanks so much to reader fanatica de peliculas for the heads-up about this beyond-delicious video. After I finished squeeing I caught my breath and prepared this quick-and-dirty translation of the voice-over. Usual caveats - it's not entirely literal, and I'm just a learner so there are probably some errors. But you get the gist.
Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar's entire family was together with them, drenched in Holi fun. Just like every year, this year's Holi celebration at their house was a great time. Several of their friends from the Bollywood world were with them sharing the Holi joy. But Shabana Azmi got into the Holi spirit even more than everyone else.
Don't feel bad - it's Holi ! Shabana Azmi and her family were saying this to everyone. Just like every year, this year Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar went all out to celebrate Holi. Many of their friends came and completely enjoyed the festival as well. The Holi colors covered Shabana Azmi beautifully. Everyone who came to this party had a very special Holi. Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar celebrated with complete abandon. And watching them, their friends could not help but join in. It made for a memorable Holi indeed.
I missed Dus kahaniyaan in the theaters,but when I noticed recently that someone had snuck parts of it up on YouTube, I couldn't resist taking a look at Rice Plate, Rohit Roy's segment starring Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah.
It was worth it.
Rice Plate is a fantastic piece of Shabaniana that every reader of this blog should take 10 minutes to watch. (What I've linked up there lacks subtitles, but I think you'll be able to follow what's going on even if you have no Hindi at all.) It's ten minutes of Shabana Azmi doing what she does best - a vibrant, physical performance in which she just transforms into an entirely different human being. In Rice Plate Shabana wears the skin of a cranky, bitter Tamilian grandma having a very, very bad day. Even though her character is dour, bigoted, and mean, I smiled through the whole thing, because her performance was a total delight. Do watch it.
Still no further news about the Rituparno Ghosh film, but a reader brought this small item to my attention, according to which Shabana Azmi is working on a project called Sorry Bhai. The film is by Onir, who directed Bas ek pal and My Brother Nikhil, and purportedly stars, in addition to Shabana ji, Sanjay Suri, Boman Irani, Sharman Joshi, and Chitrangdha Singh. Once again there's very little out there about this; here is a tiny little story that identifies the film as a romantic comedy with Shabana ji and Boman sahib playing the parents of the leads. That sounds like fun; more news when it comes.
My next item isn't directly related to Shabana ji - it merely mentions her in passing - but it piqued my interest enough to share with you. It's a report that cites Andrew Cooper, a Canadian scholar of political affairs and diplomacy, as saying that Hindi film stars ought to be pressed into diplomatic service. (Here's an interview with Mr. Cooper about the same.)
I haven't thought about this much, but it seems a little simplistic and paternalistic. I mean, yes, Bollywood celebrities have global reach and broad influence, but that's what makes them good at selling watches and fashion; it's not all that's needed for diplomacy. While our lady Shabana ji and a few others mentioned in the piece have gotten involved in political affairs, I think it's safe to assume that if the likes of Shah Rukh Khan had interest in using their celebrity in this way, then they could figure out how to do so without some Canadian wonk instructing them. The difficulty of being Shabana Azmi is that she has to take positions that some of her potential audience is uncomfortable with; she's ordered her priorities as she sees fit and has made the decision to do that, but not all celebrities are up for it.
Next, here is a nice little video from Lehren TV about the launch of writer Javed Siddiqui's book Shyam Rang (evening color), a celebration at which Shabana Azmi was present last week. (I'm sorry to not offer a translation of the video at the moment but I need to get going to the office.) I post this mostly to counterbalance the painful pictures from the Jodhaa-Akbar premiere; for Javed Siddiqui's book launch, Shabana ji looked quite herself in a lovely orange sari with a pink choli. There are a few stills here at Smash Hits.
When I saw Avtaar, I hadn't yet seen many of Shabana Azmi's mainstream films - I hadn't seen Fakira, or Parvarish, and the idea of Shabana ji prancing around trees in full-on masala mode just blew my tiny little mind to the point where I didn't really appreciate just how horrible the picturization of this song is.
Today, with some perspective, I can only conclude that she was made to look ungraceful on purpose. Shabana ji was not a great dancer in her mainstream heroine days - but she really wasn't this bad. Look for the moment at about 1:35 where she tumbles ass-over-teakettle off the berm - as I said, not pretty.
It gets a little better after that - Shabana ji looks much better in the blue sari she wears in the second segment of the song than in the hideously unflattering dress of the first segment - but it's still not good. After a few more snuggly scenes, a sinister character with a pistol shows up to interrupt the amorous frolickling - that's Shabana ji's character's father, who doesn't like the thought of his daughter canoodling with the mechanic.
I didn't much like Avtaar at the time I saw it, and having recently confessed my true feelings about Rajesh Khanna, it's only getting worse in my memory with time and distance. And the twinge of embarrassment I feel watching this song is not doing it any favors, either. I'm sharing the song with you because for me part of loving Shabana ji is exploring her weaknesses as well as her strengths, taking a little time for the places she went wrong even while reveling in all of the many things she does right. Watching her founder in a stinker like "Din mahino saal" makes gems like "Tum itna jo muskura rahe ho" and "Do naina aur ek kahani" that much more lovely.
In another appearance over the weekend, Shabana Azmi was seen waving a banner at the Mumbai Marathon. India Times reports that she traded her usual fab style for something a bit more sporting:
Wearing a red cap and a yellow shirt with 'Harmony' engraved on it, Shabana was at her sporting best. "Don't you think 'my look' is cute", joked the actor as we spotted her flagging off the 'Senior Citizens' run for Tina Ambani.
Well I couldn't leave SLP's faithful without a picture of that, so I hunted around a bit and found this video at Bollywood Hungama (formerly IndiaFM) (here's an alternate link). I think Shabana ji looks pretty cute. Anyway, she was there in support of Rahul Bose's foundation for tsunami-affected children, called The Foundation.
Just a quick note to let you all know that all four AIDS JaaGo films are available from Jaman.com, the fun movie website that I worked for last year. The films are watchable on-line - no download required - and are subtitled.
Welcome to Filmi Geek's Sounds Like Power, a blog and fan site devoted to the actor and activist Shabana Azmi - as far as I know, the only such site on the web. Enjoy the site - read, comment, visit the Geek's Guide to Shabana ji's films, sign the guestbook.
Sounds Like Power is an unofficial, fan-run website. All views expressed herein are my own, and are not those of any organization with which I may be affiliated. Nor are they those of Shabana Azmi or of any organization with which she may be affiliated.
