A long time ago, far longer than I care to remember, I was a journalist in Bombay. Years have passed, the city has changed its name, and I now live in a land far, far away, rootless, drifting, never truly belonging anywhere. I suppose I could say that about my childhood as well, never having stayed in a place long enough to call it my own. Yet, for all that, Bombay was closest to what I would call 'home'.
Digressions aside, people still ask me about my days as a journalist. I must say here that I was never a film journalist. With a double standard that seems amazing to me now, considering how much I love the movies, I thought of film journalism as something beneath me. To be fair to me, most film journalism in the nineties had begun to swing to the sensational 'scoops'; the indepth articles that Filmfare, for instance, used to carry, were things of the past. I truly had no interest in finding out who was having an affair with whom, or which actors were rivals-pretending-to-be-friends, or which actresses had catfights on outdoor shoots. So, apart from my boss, who swung violently between being Mother Hen and Dragon Lady, and deciding that I needed some sense knocked into me, sent me to interview some actors, I usually wrote features for the Magazine section apart from all the other nitty-gritty of getting a newspaper out in the long-extinct days of cut-and-paste.
One of my regular readers has been asking me about putting up my interviews from those long-gone days. From the few I have with me here in the US, harvey, this one's for you.
This is one feature that I truly enjoyed doing, as much for the joy of going to Prithvi Theatres again (I seemed to spend my weekends there anyway - they had lovely samosas and Irish coffee at the cafe too), as for the pleasure of meeting Sanjana Kapoor. (Meeting Shashi Kapoor when I went to meet her for the feature, was a bonus.)
Shashi and Jennifer's children did not seem to be very interested in films, per se. Kunal, their eldest offspring, made a reasonably good debut as hero in Ahista Ahista; Karan, their youngest, was more famous as the Bombay Dyeing model than for any of his films. Sanjana, their only daughter, had made a couple of appearances in her father's films (36 Chowringhee Lane, Utsav, Junoon), and debuted as a heroine opposite Naseeruddin Shah, of all unlikely people, in Ketan Mehta's Hero Hiralal, which, notwithstanding its box-office fate, was quite a refreshing film. She was the first Kapoor daughter to make a film appearance, paving the way for her nieces Karishma and Kareena.* However, because of her anglicised Hindi, or the timing, or her own lack of serious interest, Sanjana never quite scaled the heights in an industry that her father had charmed for over two decades. She made Prithvi Theatres her life's ambition, and even though she is no longer in charge (she left Prithvi in 2011 to form her own theatre group Junoon), she will always be remembered as Prithvi Theatre's guiding force and its best-known representative.
So, without much ado, over to Sanjana:
*Please, please bear in mind that I was very, very young when I wrote this! :)
*edited as per Shashi's corrections
*edited as per Shashi's corrections
