Mumbai : Jaya Bachchan is not known for mincing her words. This time was no different. Her session on ‘Failure of literature in Informing current cinema’ with the author Siddharth 
Shanghvi at Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest, was honest, candid and as sharp as it can get. She also chronicled her childhood in a middle-class family in Calcutta. Reminiscing about her journalist and author father she said, “My father would make us watch Bengali movies every Sunday. The movies were screened in our colony for free by the government. He said that listen carefully to the way these actors speak the language. Listen to the way they pronounce the words. You will understand how much can be said by just pronouncing the word in the correct way”.
She then went on to say how at that time she was uninterested in Satyajit Ray and did Mahanagar only because she was bribed with chocolates. “I didn’t want to do Mahanagar. But my father said that not many people get such an opportunity at 13 and that he will be extremely disappointed if I do not give myself this chance to turn my life into something else”. She added that while she was having fun on the sets of Mahanagar, she observed how meticulously Ray groomed and trained his actors to bring the characters alive in them. She spoke about the brilliance of Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Gulzar and how all these directors read so much literature and were so connected with the written word that they had no trouble whatsoever in translating the emotions from the paper on the screen. Literature was the basis of cinema.
Talking about today’s cinema she said, “I just saw this movie a week back, my son acted a complete buffoon in and I told the main actor this is the most non-sense movie I have ever seen. I also told my son that I am proud of him that he could act so stupidly, because I can’t. I really can’t and hence, I do not act in movies these days”. The audience got a glimpse in the inner world of the Bachchan’s as Jaya Bachchan went on to tell them about anecdotes of her father-in-law and the conversations she has with her husband on the state of cinema. “I was talking with Amitji last night and he said how he would love to play a mythological character,” she said.
She made her fans happy by announcing that next year she will be acting in a TV serial that is an adaptation of a Gujarati literature.
Source: Sachin Murdeshwar