Nandita Das

I first knew that there was a person called Nandita Das when RSS were going crazy after a movie in which she acted was released and did not exactly strike the right chords with them(Btw, the movie was Fire). At that time, i dismissed her as yet another of those despondent 'we-are-different-symdrome' types. Then i saw a couple of her movies in Tamil. The most important one being Kannathil Muttamittal. The movie was so engrossing that I did not give the actors the attention they deserved. (Mani took them all). And then I stumbled on her website: http://www.nanditadasonline.com. I must say my perception about her (not that it matters) has really changed. In lots of ways she remimded me about myself. From her writings, I could sense the artisitic rebellion in her. Her dogged determination to be the way she is irrespective of the way the soceity says. The more I read her articles, the more she endears herself to me. It feels good to see an artist who is committed to her art, who opens herself to the suffering arround her and most importantly is true to herself. I am usually turned off by celebrity activism because there was always a certain vulgarity about it. But reading Nandita's own experiences about her social work casts a different picture altogether. All I could see was a human being trying to do her mite.
I don't like disclaimers. I know that I know about Nandita only through a couple of her articles and that I might be wrong and all that. It's ok. I will settle for that mythical Nandita Das who is the perfect personification of those articles. For now, I have hopelessly fallen in love with that atrociously beautiful thing.