‘We cannot tolerate each other’s choice of movies’

PUNE: When a seven-year-old Shabana Azmi asked her father for a blonde doll with blue eyes, she was handed a black doll instead.
“He explained to me that black is beautiful too,” said the 66-year-old daughter of poet Kaifi Azmi.
Speaking at the Pune International Literary Festival, Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar opened up about various facets of their life.
Born in an era when the Progressive Writer’s Movement inspired anti-imperialistic and left-oriented values, the star couple imbibed these values while growing up.
“Whatever you are told in your childhood goes to your bones. There are certain values that we imbibe while growing up and when these values are undermined and violated, it bothers us,” Akhtar said.
Nationalism was one of the values instilled in Akhtar from his early age. He recalled the tricolour being hoisted at their home. It was later folded and kept in the topmost section of a shelf with due respect.
“When today I see people walking away when national anthem is played, it hurts me, ” he said.
Gender equality was another value that both of them grew up with as kids, but when reality hit them during teenage years, it astonished them, “Gender equality was an absolute given at my house. All the women --- Shaukat Kaifi (noted theatre and film actress and wife of poet Kaifi Azmi) and Sultana Jafri (wife of noted Urdu writer Ali Sardar Jafri) --- were working. When my mom wasn’t around my father combed my hair and sent us to school. I was 19 when I realised that what I take for granted as equality of gender was actually an exception rather than the rule and it came as a huge surprise to me.”
Akhtar too added, “My mother and aunts were all working women. The knowledge of inequality came late in my life. I was 18 or 19 years old when I came across an incident of domestic violence. I was blissfully unaware of it.”
The couple also spoke about the importance and strength of pluralism.
“We celebrated everything, Holi, Diwali, Eid. In the commune that we lived, beside us lived the family of Marathi actor and comedian Sudhir Joshi. His mother was conservative and orthodox and did not want us to touch her kitchen commodities. I would intentionally touch her things and she would get angry but the very next moment she would come and hug us. But today, something like that could spark a communal riot,” she said.
On a lighter note, Azmi said that though they shared a lot of similar things, they could never tolerate each other’s choice of movies and hence needed two TV sets at home. “That is the secret of a successful marriage: ‘Ek biwi aur do TV’,” Akhtar quipped.