Imaad Shah and Vivaan Shah, the two sons of actor Naseeruddin Shah, have reportedly been convincing their father to get back to filmmaking. Having directed Yun Hota Toh Kya Hota in 2006, Naseeruddin stuck to acting and continued directing plays instead. His sons, however, want him to bring Indian writer Ismat Chughtai’s story, Nivala, to screen.
Speaking to Asian Age, his younger son Vivaan said, “I would love to be directed by my father. My brother and I were both trying to convince him to get back to directing. Hopefully, we will see that soon. He’s a big fan of Ismat Chugtai’s story, which is very close to him. Dad has been wanting to direct it as well. In fact, he’s already adapted it and has written the screenplay of it, but we are convincing him to make it into a movie. I’m hoping and waiting for the day that happens.”
Incidentally, Naseeruddin has even adapted this story for theatre. He had professed his love for the writer in an interview with Open Magazine in 2015. “In 1998, when I walked into a bookstore named Danai in Bandra, the first thing that greeted me was a book of short stories by Ismat Apa. They were very badly translated and I immediately got the version with the Devanagari script. The minute I read them, I knew I had to tell these stories through our play Ismat Apa Ke Naam. My wife Ratna and daughter Heeba were unsure at first because the stories were in Urdu, a language most wouldn’t understand and they were from an era gone past. But the beauty of any writing is that it transcends the time it has been written in,” he said.
Recommended
‘Nivala’, meaning morsel in Urdu, is about a group of women residing in a chawl who are trying to find a groom for a lonely spinster who works as a nurse. Resonating with the voices of women around her, Chughtai’s stories often deal with women in a feminist angle – the social implications, the world around them, and the injustice faced by them.
Last seen in eco-thriller Irada, Naseeruddin Shah’s next is an international project called The Hungry with Sayani Gupta.
Pic: Open Magazine