Real stealers in reel life

doweshowbellyad=0; Shefali Chaya Single-handedly, from the age of 14, she became her family���s bread earner.
For 65 years she has ruled the film industry defining and re-defining the very core of Hindi cinema���s existence through her voice, paving the way for other women to come to the entertainment industry fearlessly and free of gender biases.
They���re the NBSS (Natural-Born Scene Stealers).How I love those feisty women! Shefali Shah, what an actress. What���s she doing standing in the shadows ���supporting��� Anil Kapoor in her latest movie? Whether playing the melancholic and feisty Kasturba in Gandhi My Father or the funny Roma Mathur in her current movie, Shefali simply fills the screen up with her delightful Joie De Vivre.
She celebrates the joys of womanhood in all its colours without becoming a rainbowy caricature. Oh, how I adore those screen women who can bathe the frames in their effervescence without becoming sex objects. Like Aroona Irani. She can chew up any co-star in sight without a burp. In all my years as a movie buff how many deaths have I died watching poor Aroona Irani playing second fiddle to actresses who don���t have even a shred of her talent. But, has she ever cribbed about how grossly unjust life has been to her? She has just gone about making the best of the the space provided.
Ditto Farida Jalal. A natural born scene-stealer, if ever there was one. In a star-spangled show like Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... Farida managed to create an endearing synthesis of smiles and sobs. To me, she represented the khushi and the khushi within the gham in Karan���s film. What I love most about these feisty women is their never-say-dye spirit. And, I do mean dye. Aroona must have been barely 40 when she played Sanjay Kapoor���s nanny in Prem. This dai-maa happily put grey in her jet-black hair and furnished spirited moments in her cramped playing time that God, leading lady, heroine and destiny(in that order) provided her. Divya Dutta is another NBSS. Put her in any corner of the screen, and she���ll make her presence felt. And, when she sees airheaded floozies take centrestage, she can still keep a straight face. That���s what makes her a fabulous actress.
I once spoke to one of these NBSS women and she told me about this huge hero who offered to make her his heroine ��� for a price. ���I told him exactly where he can shove his offer,��� we chuckled over hot pakoras on a humid Sunday afternoon. ���See, for all us actresses, whom you call scene-stealers, there���s no easy way out.
Most of the heroes are our buddies. I think one reason why we don���t become heroines is because we���re too much like yaaron ka yaar. We don���t flutter our eyelashes and play up to the heroes. I���m not saying the heroines do anything wrong to get it right. But, there���s a certain flirtatiousness and coyness that doesn���t come naturally to me. And sorry, I can���t pretend to be coquettish when I���d rather be cocky.��� I think this feisty friend of mine has a point. Knowingly or unknowingly leading ladies do pamper their heroes on and off the sets. It���s the only way to ensure a series of films with a saleable co-star. The flirting game can get publicly obnoxious at times.
There was this Bengali actress who would saucily plonk herself in her co-stars��� laps in full view of the crew. Squirmy? That���s what the NBSS couldn���t be. And, maybe that���s why we love them so much. My all-time favourite NBSS is Mumtaz. Gawd, how I love that woman.
She would fill up the screen like none other. Put her in the back of some hammy over-painted heroine who couldn���t tell a scene apart from a scream, or put her in the same frame as a hero who wore more lipstick that she did, Mumtaz sizzled in the weirdest and smallest of roles. She virtually crawled out of her pout to create a stunning superstardom for herself that no one could replicate. Mumtaz could move ahead from being Mumtaz���s comic sidekick to Rajesh Khanna and Dev Anand���s love interest. Aroona Irani couldn���t. Hota hai.
But, have you ever seen Aroona���s smile slip off her face? How I wish these women of substance would get substantial space on screen. For all her posthumous glory, Smita Patil couldn���t in her lifetime achieve recognition in mainstream cinema she craved for. I remember hearing how she had wept when she returned home after doing the rain song-and-dance with Mr Bachchan in Namak Halaal.
She wasn���t comfortable being the conventional screen queen. And, unless you can carry that off convincingly, you aren���t destined to fly high in the commercial bandwagon. How I wish I had met Smita. But, at that time I was too busy being ���loyal��� to Shabana. That���s how it has always been for me. Never either or. Always one, not the other. Always Lata Mangeshkar, never Asha Bhosle. Always Sridevi, never Madhuri. Always Kamal Haasan, never Rajnikanth. Lately, I���ve begun to understand the importance of allowing space for the alternative view to seep into my viewpoint. But, that won���t stop me from celebrating excellence even at the cost of sounding biased.