Naseeruddin Shah’s comments on Deepika Padukone and Anupam Kher created a stir as the veteran sat down to speak about the ongoing anti-CAA-NRC-NPR issue across the country.
In an interaction with The Wire, he spoke of the silence in the film industry on political issues, the violence against the student community among other things.
Stating that it was understandable why so many celebrities were reluctant to comment on the issue for the fear of losing business, he praised Deepika Padukone’s JNU visit.
“You have to laud the courage of a girl like Deepika who is in the top and yet takes a step like this. Let us see how she takes this. She’ll lose a few endorsements, sure. Will that impoverish her? Will that lessen her popularity? Will that make her less beautiful that she is? They’re going to come around sooner or later. The only god that the film industry worships is money. Their silence is not as important as the vociferousness of the younger generation,” he said.
He also criticized Anupam Kher for his cryptic tweets addressing the violence during anti-CAA protests and said, “I am not on Twitter. These people, the Twitterati, and I really wish they would make up their minds in what they believe in. Someone like Anupam Kher has been very vocal. I don’t think, he needs to be taken seriously, he is a clown, any number of his contemporaries from NSD, NFTII can test to his psychopathic nature, it is in his blood, he can’t help it. The others who are opposing it should really decide about what they want to say and don’t remind us of our responsibilities, we known our responsibilities.”
Like Anurag Kashyap, Naseeruddin also shared that he would like to look at PM Modi’s degree in political science when condemning the violence against the student protestors across the country.
On the work front, he was last seen in Vivek Agnihotri’s The Tashkent Files, which was based on the mysterious death of India’s second PM Lal Bahadur Shastri in Tashkent.