Disappointed with the roles being offered to her, actress Swara Bhaskar has written a script for herself to star in. The premise is a love triangle featuring two men and a woman. Bhaskar, whose last film was Nil Battey Sannata, started writing the story focusing on the female lead, but as work progressed, she found her male characters more interesting. “I hope I don’t have to audition for my film. I had written it wanting to play the female character but now that it is over, I think both the male characters are very interesting,” she told PTI News.
Bhaskar is not new to writing. She was a part of the third edition of ‘New Voices Fellowship for Screenwriters,’ a programme that focused on scripts that were gender-sensitive, women-centric and driven by well-defined women characters. Bhaskar has written several vocal and opinionated open-letters in the Indian news media related to breaking news events.
During the protests at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) last year, Bhaskar wrote an open-letter to student Umar Khaled. A former student of JNU, Bhaskar’s piece for The Quint was was a sarcastic attempt to highlight the importance of free speech in India.
“I don’t want to convince you to surrender and then have you beaten to death by self-righteously-patriotic-hooligan mobs; or tortured by arrogant and indifferent right-wing cops in prison cells. I don’t want your death or torture (God forbid, I mean Marx forbid) to be on my head. That glory should lie with Arnab Goswami (Times Now), Rahul Shivshankar (News X), that guy on Zee News who was yelling at you, India TV and all those other hysterical anchors. Let them be known as your murderers.”
In June this year, she wrote an open-letter to Pahlaj Nihalani, chief of the censor board who refused to certify Udta Punjab without the 80 cuts he prescribed. Writing in The Wire, Bhaskar wrote about how Nihalani’s work impacts hers, “even though you may not know.”
The following has happened during each of the last three films that I’ve dubbed. Some time after I think that I’ve completed the dubbing, I get a call from the team and am asked to come and re-dub certain portions of the film because, you and/or your review committee have said that the words sala/saali/haraamzada/rakhail and bloody(!) variously will have to be removed if the makers want a U/A certificate. Of course haraami, kutiya and bitch have now been on the black list of unspeakable words for long. But poor ineffectual, almost affectionate words saalaa and saali??? Bloody, the term I heard my whole childhood from my gruff naval officer father when he felt affection for us: ‘you poor bloody brat ’ is offensive!?
Even in a certified family drama your team did not spare me and I was made to remove the word rakhail from my dub and (it brought tears to my eyes when I saw the final cut; but only actors would know what I feel) because I was not in the city and the final print had to be readied, a different voice dubbed that ONE WORD, just that one word in the final version of the film.
Bhaskar is hoping to pitch her script to filmmakers soon. “I want to pitch this film to producers, directors and hope by next year work begins on it. I would also want Aanand (L Rai) sir to listen to it,” she said.
