Shilpa Shirodkar recalls being labelled ‘panauti' after her first 2 films were shelved: ‘Whenever I signed a big film…'
Shilpa recalled what was meant to be a dream launch in 1986 with filmmaker Sawan Kumar Tak's Sautan Ki Beti, which never saw the light. 'On the 9th of August, I did my Mahurat at Filmalaya Studios. It was one of the biggest launch pads. Sawan ji was making Sautan Ki Beti, and I was playing the title role. It couldn't have been bigger than that. But two years later, nothing had happened. Sawan ji said, 'I'm not making the film. If you get something from outside, take it,' she shared.
Following that, her mother reached out to photographer Gautam Rajadhyaksha, who connected her with Boney Kapoor and Surinder Kapoor for a film. She said that Boney's father liked her and promised to cast her opposite Sanjay Kapoor in a film called Jungle. But they dropped that idea and decided to make Prem instead, and she didn't fit the role. That film also slipped out of her hands.
Shilpa added that industry insiders began gossiping about her string of missed opportunities, following which a well-wisher approached Mithun Chakraborty. 'He said, 'Dada, this girl's two films have been shelved and now the industry is calling her all sorts of names—please launch her.' They said I was jinxed, a panauti. Whenever I signed a big film, it got shelved. But if you have strong family support, these things don't matter.'
Eventually, Shilpa made her acting debut in Ramesh Sippy's Bhrashtachar in 1989, starring alongside Mithun Chakraborty and Rekha, where she portrayed a blind girl. The film earned her recognition, and she soon appeared in hits like Kishen Kanhaiya (1990), Trinetra (1991), and Hum (1991). Her filmography went on to include notable titles such as Khuda Gawah, Aankhen, Pehchaan, Gopi Kishan, Bewafa Sanam, and Mrityudand.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Hindustan Times
11 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
The Great Indian Kapil Show: Shilpa Shetty roasts sister Shamita Shetty, Huma Qureshi's mother warns Kapil Sharma. Watch
As India gears up to celebrate Raksha Bandhan on August 9, The Great Indian Kapil Show is bringing together two of Bollywood's most beloved sibling duos, Shilpa Shetty and Shamita Shetty, and Huma Qureshi and Saqib Saleem, for a fun-filled festive episode. A promo of the upcoming episode, leaked on social media, promises laughter, teasing, and plenty of sibling banter as the guests hilariously call each other out. Shamita Shetty and Shilpa Shetty, Huma Qureshi with her brother Saqib Saleem and mother, grace Kapil Sharma's show. Shilpa Shetty roasts Shamita Shetty on Kapil Sharma's show In the promo video, Shilpa jokes about Kapil Sharma's weight loss, to which he quips back that he must've learnt it from her, joking that he's growing shorter by the year. When Kapil asks if Shamita shares everything with her sister, Shilpa replies, 'She only hides boyfriend matters with me.' Shamita quickly responds that she doesn't hide it anymore, and Shilpa confirms, 'It's because she's single now.' Kapil cheekily asks Shamita, 'Otherwise you like men, right?' to which she exclaims, 'Of course!' — leaving her sister in splits. Shilpa doesn't hold back and even roasts Shamita's dating choices. When Sunil (dressed as a girl) asks, 'What should one see in a man?' Huma says, 'Handsome, tall,' and Shamita adds, 'Intelligence.' Shilpa then turns to her sister and quips, 'Lekin tu fir intelligence dekhti kyun nahi hai? Sirf body dekhti hai' (But then why don't you look at intelligence? You only look at the body). Huma Qureshi's mother warns Kapil Sharma Meanwhile, Huma and Saqib make a dramatic entry holding a giant rakhi to tie on Kapil. Later, Kapil is seen interacting with Huma's mother, who is in the audience. Jokingly, he says, 'I got married waiting for Huma,' to which her mother replies, 'Vo shuru se aapko bhai bolti hai, aur uski laaj rakhna chahiye aapko, nahi manoge to fir…' (She's been calling you 'brother' from the beginning, and you should respect that. If you don't, then…). A startled Kapil is then heard saying, 'Inka koi mike band karo, gundi hai aapki mummy?' (Turn off her mic — is your mum a goon?). About The Great Indian Kapil Show Hosted by Kapil Sharma, the show blends sketch comedy, celebrity interviews, and stand-up, with a familiar ensemble cast including Sunil Grover, Kiku Sharda, and Krushna Abhishek. The latest season has seen Navjot Singh Sidhu return as a permanent guest alongside Archana Puran Singh. A new twist this season allows fans to take the stage and showcase their talent. New episodes stream every Saturday on Netflix.
News18
13 hours ago
- News18
Shilpa Shirodkar Wishes Chum, Karan Veer On Friendship Day: ‘Thank God For Bigg Boss'
Bigg Boss 18 fame Shilpa Shirodkar shared an appreciation post for her 'Machardaani gang' including Chum Darang, Karan Veer Mehra and Digvijay Rathee. Bigg Boss 18 fame Shilpa Shirodkar has shared a special post to shower love on her loved ones, on Friendship Day 2025. She first shared a picture with her 'very best friend' and sister Namrata Shirodkar. She then celebrated her daughter Anoushka, husband Aparesh Ranjit, and other friends. Lastly, she gave a shoutout to the 'Machardaani Gang' which consists of her fellow Bigg Boss 18 contestants Karan Veer Mehra, Chum Darang and Digvijay Rathee. She wrote that she is lucky to have found such gem of friends on the show, and that she will always cherish the precious memories with them. In her post, Shilpa Shirodkar wrote, 'Happy Friendships' Day to all!!! It's quite a special day today! Friends are the most beautiful part of each and everyone's journey and without them, life feels incomplete and mundane. To my Chinu, my sister, my world, my whole… Firstly, a very happy sisters' day and to my very first best friend. I just can't imagine my life without you! The second MOSSSST important person in my life, my beautiful daughter and my biggest cheerleader! We argue, we fight but no words can express the bond and the friendship that we share!" She also posted a picture with her niece Sitara, calling her an angel. Celebrating her Bigg Boss 18 friends, Shilpa wrote, 'And last but not the least, the OG #MachardaaniGang (Chum, Karan & Digvijay)- you guys are the best thing ever happened to me! Thank god for Bigg Boss that I found such gem of friends and the memories we had will always be etched for a lifetime! FOREVER GRATEFUL FOR HOW RANDOMLY WE GOT CLOSE!" View this post on Instagram A post shared by Shilpa Shirodkar Ranjit (@shilpashirodkar73) Chum Darang commented on Shilpa's post, and wrote, 'Happy friendship day to youuuuuuuuuuuu." The solid friendship between Karan Veer Mehra, Shilpa Shirodkar and Chum Darang often grabs fans' attention. During their time on the Salman Khan-hosted show, the trio shared a strong emotional bond was seen supporting each other through thick and thin. Later, Digvijay Rathee entered the show as a wildcard contestant and joined the group, and it seems the connection between all four of them lasted beyond the Bigg Boss walls. First Published: Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Hindustan Times
17 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
From Brooklyn to Rome: Katie Kitamura on writing, family, pleasure
Dear Reader, I wrote Audition during the pandemic, during that tension of sharing space again with people you love, having to recalibrate those relationships. That fed into the story --- Katie Kitamura (The The Booker Prize longlist is out and our most discussed book of the year is on it! For weeks we have been obsessed with this brilliantly constructed novella. What is the truth of our protagonist's life? We don't know what to believe about this New York-based theatre actor — she is an unreliable narrator for sure — but which version of herself is 'true'? There is a war on, when we read the book. 'Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience,' says George Eliot, and in a bizarre sequence of events, we watch this come true. We see a correspondence between the competing narratives in Audition and in life. On national television, Indian anchors declare they have won the war. On the internet, Pakistan claims it has won, having shot down Indian fighter jets. There is a third version as the US takes credit for a ceasefire, contradicting the Indian and the Pakistani versions. Reading Audition, we don't know what to believe. Is our protagonist really a mother — is the young man called Xavier her biological son? And can we ever truly know a person? It is thrilling when Katie Kitamura agrees to join us on Zoom to discuss her writing. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation — everything from the truth of this Booker Prize longlisted novella to how Katie met her writer husband Hari Kunzru, plus tips on how to get your children to read. Katie Kitamura on Zoom Thank you for joining us on your Friday morning. Can you tell us what you see out of your window? I am at home in Brooklyn, and when I look out the window, I see trees, which is surprising because I'm in the middle of a city, but in fact, the neighborhood where I live has these enormous, very established trees that are about five stories tall. Your parents immigrated from Japan when they were in their twenties. You were born in California and grew up living on the college campus at UC Davis. What was your childhood like? It was an idyllic childhood, full of reading. I read indiscriminately — Little Women and the Ellen Montgomery series, Anne of Green Gables, Sweet Valley High. We had a full shelf of Agatha Christie novels and my mother and I read them together. I loved reading those books and the pleasure remained even once you knew the solution. And that taught me about reading and pleasure — that it isn't simply linked to plot and narrative; fiction can feel like a world that you can escape into. You're married to the novelist Hari Kunzru; you're this power literary couple. And of course, we've read Hari's work, and we love it — and love yours too. So can we be a little cheesy and ask you how you met? We met a long time ago, at a dinner that Zadie Smith organised. I was working at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. And Zadie was a writer-in-residence, and one of the things she did as part of her program was to organize a dinner with like 20 of the most exciting new young writers in Britain, and Hari was one of them. And I was not. I was not even writing at the time. I was just working, but Zadie had asked me to help organize this and also come to the dinner, and that's when I first met Hari, and we stayed friends till we got together eight or nine years later. And then, Katie, you wrote The Longshot, and it was set in the world of mixed martial arts? It received a lot of attention and readers were fascinated with this slender young Asian woman who was once a ballerina now writing about mixed martial arts. Tell us more about this experience. I was following in the footsteps of my dad, doing my doctorate, on my way to be an academic. I had never studied creative writing. Then I had this strange thought, which was that I wouldn't follow the golden rule, which is, write what you know. I would do the inverse, and I would write what I didn't know. I would try to use the process of writing fiction as a way of learning about the world. I chose to write a very masculine novel, to write about the dynamic of a relationship between father and son. When I finished writing the book, I realised that although I had done vast amounts of research, what I had really been drawing from was not just all those hours of following fighters and going to matches and studying technique. What I was drawing on was actually my own childhood and adolescence as a classical ballet dancer, the incredibly tough physical regimen of dancing three to four hours every day. Trying to write about these men and writing about training, I was actually writing about myself and my own experiences. That was the first real lesson I learned about writing fiction, which is that you're always revealing yourself in some way. You're always drawing from your own experience, whether you like it or not. So no matter how far away from your own life you write, you always end up face to face with yourself. That was freeing and helped me to continue writing fiction. I wanted to ask you about your relationship with language. Your protagonists in A Separation and Intimacies are both translators. You also speak more than one language. For the first few years of my life, Japanese was the household language. When I was five, we spent a summer in Japan with my cousins, and everybody was speaking Japanese. When I came back to the United States, I forgot how to speak English. Soon after, when I started kindergarten, the school told my parents to stop speaking Japanese to me so that I would be able to catch up and learn English. It was a terrible mistake, and today I can see it as part of this ideological programming of assimilation. Over time, my Japanese slipped away. Today I can speak Japanese, but I cannot read with any ease, and I certainly cannot write in Japanese, which is a source of real sadness to me. But I think, in a funny way, it's something that has fed my fiction because the prose that I write is in some way haunted by another language. I'm very interested in trying to find syntax and forms of sentence structure that are perhaps outside the norm for English. I use a lot of comma splices, a lot of what would be called run-on sentences, which are not technically grammatically correct, but which wouldn't be so unusual in some other languages. There was also an experience that will be familiar to many second-generation children of immigrants. If you acquire fluency in the dominant language in a country, you're often called upon to speak English on behalf of the family. There was a period when I spoke English better than my parents, and I was the one who had to order the pizza or do whatever needed doing. I think that dynamic probably led to my interest in this question of interpretation, which I explored in Intimacies. In both Audition and Intimacies, we see multiple versions of competing narratives. What motivates you to create this kind of play? When I was a very young reader, I thought my assessment of what was happening in a book was objective. Now I understand that it varies wildly depending on where I am in my life—even where I am in my day. I realise how much of my own history and baggage is involved in interpretation. To be really honest, a book can seem much better when I've had a cup of coffee! The books that have moved me most over the course of my life are the ones that accommodate multiple readings. Take Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady—a brilliant book. When I was young, I thought it was a novel about a young woman's coming of age. Later, I saw it as a novel about the tremendous disappointment of life. It's both, of course. That mutability—how a text shifts depending on the reader—is something I wanted to explore actively in this book. That meant writing a book that felt airy, with a structure big enough for both me and the reader. I didn't want to write a book where the author knows all the answers and the 'right' reader has to guess them. I don't want that kind of relationship with my reader. I wanted the book to feel more like a collaboration. Audition, for instance, is what I call a rabbit–duck novel—you can look at it one way and see a rabbit, and another way and see a duck. Couples have come to book events and said, 'I thought it was this,' and their partner said, 'I thought it was that,' and asked which one it is. And of course, it's designed to be both. The Rabbit Duck novel How did the idea for Audition come to you? It started with a headline I saw: 'A stranger told me he was my son.' I didn't read the article—I assumed it would have a logical explanation, and that wasn't interesting to me. What fascinated me was the tension between 'stranger' and 'son.' I went for a walk with a friend of mine whose son was around 24, and I said, 'This headline preoccupies me, and I don't know why.' And she said, 'That's motherhood. Every time your child returns home, it's like a stranger has walked into the apartment.' That was really the feeling I carried into the book. We're conditioned to believe in total knowledge and intimacy between partners, and I was interested in exploring how even the most universal experiences—marriage, parenting—contain moments of profound strangeness and unfamiliarity. In A Separation, the narrator finds her husband a stranger. In Audition, it's the mother–son dynamic. And I always feel the period in which you're writing a book expresses itself in the book, even without any direct references. I wrote Audition during the pandemic, during that tension of sharing space again with people you love, having to recalibrate those relationships. That fed into the story. You are married to a fellow writer. Do you discuss each other's work? We're each other's first readers, and we want to come to the manuscript as fresh as possible. So we don't talk about our work while we're writing it. Because if I explain what I hope the novel is doing, then by the time he reads the first draft, he already knows—and he's no longer the ideal litmus-test reader. And you are all readers? It's the thing that ties our family together. At all moments, everybody would rather be reading. How did you raise your children to be readers? Our children are growing up surrounded by books, and they see us reading all the time. But it's not just that. Reading is a pleasure. Our children were always allowed to read whatever they wanted. If they asked for a book at the bookshop, we would get it. They took pride in accumulating books, just like us. We also let them find the books they wanted to read. When we've tried to give them the books we loved as children, they've resisted a bit—like when my husband gave our 12-year-old son the complete Terry Pratchett collection and said, 'You're going to love these.' He didn't. But when he finds a series on his own that feels like it belongs just to him, he devours it. As a child, I felt that reading was a private place where I could feel and know things that no one else in my family did. I try to respect that with my children. If they want to read something that feels completely their own, that's actually the best way to make reading a source of deep pleasure. A Separation is set in Greece, Intimacies in the Netherlands, and each setting feels like a character. Do you travel as a family to these places? What is the experience of travel like? I like to set my books internationally—except for Audition, which is set in New York. I'm drawn to characters who have just arrived somewhere and must figure out what it means to be there—whether in terms of behaviour, custom, or even ethics. I can't imagine life without travel, and I see my children organize their imaginations around it, too. Both Hari and I teach at New York University, which has campuses around the world—especially the one in Paris, where we teach every summer. Hari has family in India, and we took our son there when he was two. I have a family in Japan. So our children have the travel bug. Even though they're still little, they're great travellers. New places give them a sharpness of observation. And finally, tell us about your next book. It's a novel set in Rome, and it's about pleasure in a way my earlier books have not been. I did a fellowship in Rome, and we lived there for six months as a family. It's a complicated place, but one filled with many, many pleasures. Our book club conversation with Katie ends leaving us with much to think about. Like what parts of our lives are performance? Which version of ourselves is the 'real' one? And can anyone—ever—truly be known? These are just the kind of provocative questions that capture the problems of our age, thus giving Audition a well deserved place on the Booker Prize 2025 long list. (Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya's Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or reading dilemmas, write to her at sonyasbookbox@ The views expressed are personal)
