11/12Zohra Sehgal

Zohra Sehgal
The veteran actress said, "Life's been tough but I've been tougher. I beat life at its own game." However, she polished her looks with sheer grit. She also sparked a joke, "You see me now when I am old and ugly, in fact you should have seen me earlier — when I was young and ugly! I've lived to the fullest — I've squeezed the best out of life. A good husband, children, family and most importantly my work - I am close to 100 and even with such a shriveled up face and figure I can boast that I've still got work, fame and money! I've not gone into oblivion." She also said, "I was staying with a countess and my nose was up in the air! I pooh-poohed girls in bare nothings taking bath in water fountains, thinking they are girls from economically challenged families. Alas, I realised that those 'teeny-weeny things' were actually called bikinis and were hot fashion items. I immediately discarded my Victorian bloomers (which I thought were quite aristocratic), and got into my first bikini.” One of the best was, "I don't understand the hullabaloo about inner beauty. What actually makes brings out your beauty is the radiance of being content and you can only be content when you are employed in something you love. When admirers praise me for raising the paradigm for women in acting, I say b***s. What have I done for them consciously? Whatever I've done, I've done it for love of acting, fame and power. The love for life and work probably radiates as my inner beauty!"readmore

12/12Nandita Das

Nandita Das
Nandita Das said, “No, it's not that I don't like being introduced as an actress. It's just that there are many different things I do and I struggle with [deciding] which one I should own up to more.So, acting is something I've been doing for the last 20 years but I don't see it as a profession, as a career. It's more of an interest, more of a means to an end. It does give me the opportunity to talk about things that I really care for. So I see it more as that and if I had to divide my time, I think I'd spend more time in social advocacy work and less in acting. And some in directing.” She even once said that, “Yeah, I think in a lot of feminist discourse we've worked with a lot of women, as we should. Therefore women are the ones questioning, raising their voice, coming into the public space, etc, but men somehow, largely - of course, this is a generalisation - are where they were. Because we haven't engaged enough with men. So there's a bigger gap happening there, and I think there's a real need to engage with men and to make them understand that this is not against men. That it is at a societal, at a larger level that we want more equality - that is good for them, good for the women, good for the world we live in. And I think that message hasn't gone through enough, and that's why there's a greater need [to include them]. Manto, even though he's a man, it doesn't mean that every woman is writing feminist stuff. Women are also conditioned by patriarchy. So it's really more about patriarchy as opposed to man vs woman. So I think, for feminist reasons, for reasons of freedom of expression, reasons of struggles of identity, Manto is extremely relevant today.”readmore