Wednesday Sep 12 10:42 PM
That Shobana is a very talented actress goes without saying. But unfortunately she does not have the same dexterity with the Hindi language and that proved to be quite a headache initially for the director Kaushik Roy on the sets of Apna Asmaan. But that was till Shobana found a novel solution.
The actress insisted that she was a great mimic and no language was ever a problem for her. During the shoot, a prompter was used to help her with her lines. But the next hurdle that came up was during editing and sound recording, as it was a nightmare trying to differentiate between the voices of Shobana and the prompter. Kaushik and his sound engineer, Raju Hegde insisted that the dubbing should be done by Shobana herself as the voice had to match her performance. Her performance in the film is exceptional and could easily win her an award. But the actress could loose out only because of someone else's voice. Everybody else in the directorial team felt valuable time was being wasted. But the first day of dubbing was a disaster. Shobana could get nothing right. The biggest stumbling block for her was to differentiate between 'main' and 'mein'. She was so disgusted that she decided to pack her bags and go back to Chennai. But the next day saw an energized Shobana. She was very good. On the third day, Shobana finished her dubbing and now wanted to revisit her earlier lines and improve on them. At the end of it, Kaushik was a happy man. In any case, Shobana plays a character from the South living in Mumbai. So her accented Hindi went well with her character. It prompted the sound recordist to say that this was the biggest coup after Hemaji's Hindi!