Loud and clear

A stunner in her denims and black-and-white kurta with her long hair neatly settled over her right shoulder,Tabu has been missing from the silver screen for nearly three years. She was last seen in Cheeni Kum (2007),where she was wooed by Amitabh Bachchan. “Doing films is not a career for me. It’s always been a way of life. I don’t need to do 10 films a year and prove anything to anyone. I act because I love it. As I grow older,I’m going to become more and more selective about the kind of films that I would like to do.”

Now after a long wait,Tabu’s fans will finally see her in Ramesh Taurani’s Toh Baat Pakki!,which releases today. The film is set in a small town and Tabu plays Rajeshwari—who is obsessed about finding a perfect husband for her younger sister. In the film,she goes all out to play a completely loud and emotional character. In fact,the character was the main draw for her to do the film. “I’m very unlike Rajeshwari. The fact that I had to play someone so different from my actual self sounded like fun. Rajeshwari is in-your-face,talkative,manipulative and overbearing. I believe that I’m nothing like that. This role got out the closet loud person in me,” she laughs. If she needed further convincing to do the role,then the story did the trick.

Once that happened,the talented actor had no qualms of working with a Kedar Shinde,who debuts in Bollywood with this film,and a relatively young cast of Yuvika Choudhary,Vatsal Sheth and Sharman Joshi. “It’s always nice to work with new people. Shooting for the film was smooth-sailing. It was so much fun because the entire cast got along so well. We were shooting in Ooty,and I remember how Vatsal would go around on his own to discover the best food and coffee joints. He would take us all there later,” recounts the actor,who now lives mainly in Hyderabad.

For someone who’s been in the industry for nearly two decades,Tabu insists that nothing has changed since she started her career as a 15-year-old in Hum Naujawan. “Everything works exactly the same. The look of the films might have changed but the basic mechanism is just like the way it used to be. The amount of professionalism in filmmaking has not increased or decreased over the years. The only thing which has exploded is the amount of media attention. Marketing a film now requires as much time and effort as making one,” she adds.

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