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Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who recently directed the film 12th Fail, has been making movies since the 1970s. After making acclaimed films like Parinda and 1942: A Love Story, the director made the 1998 film Kareeb with Bobby Deol and newcomer Neha (now known as Shabana Raza). But the making of the film was not a pleasant experience for the actors involved in the film. In fact, at one point Vinod lost his temper on Shabana quite badly and actually bit her hand. In a 2001 interview with Filmfare, Bobby recalled this incident and said that he was “too shocked to react” when the incident took place.
Deol shared that Chopra “had discovered her in Delhi” and said that “Neha was raw” as this was her first feature film. He also mentioned that Vinod gave “her a tough time” as he would “yell at her constantly.” “There is a certain vulnerability about her. Kareeb was my third film and I was just beginning to feel settled. Neha was raw. And Vinod gave her a tough time. He’d yell at her constantly,” he shared. Bobby acknowledged his surname here and added that no one ever yelled at him because of his father Dharmendra. “No one pulled me up, maybe because my father’s famous,” he said.
He then recalled how Vinod actually bit Shabana’s hand in one scene so she would remember which hand she should extend in a particular scene. “For one scene, Neha had to come down the mountain and give me her left hand. But she kept getting confused. When she couldn’t get this right after repeated takes, Vidhu asked her to bite her right hand. She did but she still got it wrong in the next take. After 20 takes, Vidhu lost his cool. And you know what he did? He bit her right hand. I was too shocked to react,” he recalled.
Bobby said that Shabana was shocked when this happened and was actually “shivering.” He recalled, “Poor thing, she was shivering with fright. But even in the okay take, she puts out her right hand.”
Shabana has never spoken about this particular incident but in an earlier interview, she mentioned how her name was forcibly changed from Shabana to Neha. Speaking to Rediff in 2008, she said, “I was never Neha. I was always Shabana. I was forced into changing my name too. I was not okay with it at all. My parents proudly named me Shabana. There was no need to change it, but nobody listened to me.” In the same interview, she also mentioned that she was not keen to act in films but since the makers of Kareeb were very interested in casting her, she tried her hand at acting.
Shabana is now married to actor Manoj Bajpayee.
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