MY KOLKATA EDUGRAPH
ADVERTISEMENT
Regular-article-logo Wednesday, 28 May 2025

SEN SEASON, ON STAGE & SCREEN 

Read more below

FROM CHANDRIMA BHATTACHARYA Published 06.06.01, 12:00 AM
Mumbai, June 6 :    Mumbai, June 6:  It would be senseless if you thought - like a lot of other people - Rima Sen was Moon Moon Sen's daughter. But then it would make perfect sense if you thought Nandana Sen was Amartya Sen's daughter. And, then again, if you thought there's too much of Sens, it wouldn't be nonsensical, not at all. For, there are really too many of them in Mumbai's showbiz, not accounting for the most sensuous of them all, Sushmita. Nandana and Rima, as it happens, are making news at the same time. One appears on-stage as a cool, all-black-clad, empowered, Gen-X type of a woman. An ad pro, she doesn't shrink from throwing ideas at a party about an enlightened sanitary napkin campaign. The other appears on-screen as, well, a pretty face about which not much else is important. Nandana, the Nobel laureate's daughter so far associated with non-mainstream cinema, is making her professional stage debut as a victim of child abuse. Rima is co-starring with alleged drug offender Fardeen Khan in the movie Hum Ho Gaye Aap Ke. Her pictures with Khan at a movie function were splashed over all major dailies recently. For no Raima or reason, she was instantly mistaken as Raima, Moon Moon Sen's actress-daughter, who would appear quite indistinguishable from her younger sister Riya in the first place. The confusion was unendurable. Is Bollywood too small for all these Sens or is it that nubile actresses look too much like each other to be sensational? Nandana, though still quite overshadowed by her surname - however, looks like herself. Tall and lissome, her face framed with a mass of curls, in 30 Days in September - the latest offering from Mahesh Dattani, one of the country's better-known playwrights who write in English - the dusky Nandana appears as Mala, a woman with a troubled past. The play, which premiered last week at Prithvi Theatre, may have been panned by some - it was described as 'a tedious, too-long, late-night weepie' by a critic - but her character leaves Nandana excited. Mala, the cellphone-wielding pro, is seemingly confident, but her 'personal life is a morass of insecurities'. Haunted by the sex-abuse she faced in her childhood - the play was commissioned by RAHI, an NGO working with survivors of incest and child abuse - she is hungry for love and at the same time terrified of love. She is a woman conflicted with the entire range of conflicting feelings. Life is much simpler for Rima, who was born and brought up in Calcutta, but would rather not dwell too much on biography. 'My role in Hum Ho Gaye Aap Ke is very simple, so simple that it is hard to define,' she says. A former model with about 40 commercials to her credit, her first movie is due for release in July. 'I play a woman of today - a very confident girl - in Hum Ho...,' Rima adds. The 5'5' actress - without heels, she asserts - is starring in another film, Jaal, with Sunny Deol, Tabu and Jackie Shroff. 'There, I play a bubbly 20-year-old, very different from the one in Hum Ho...' What makes sense to this Sen is her motto: movies, movies and more movies. For the other Sen, who has appeared in Gautam Ghosh's Gudiya, two Canadian, one American and one Italian film, acting alone isn't enough. Nandana is a writer, too, and in a film that is a Norwegian-Indian co-production she is doing both. Selected to act first, she was also asked to take over the writing of it later. That is where she sees herself in the future - on the interface between acting and writing. Same Sens, different sensibilities.    
Follow us on:
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT