I won’t repeat mom’s mistakes: Soha
Noreen Aslam

BOMBAY—Sharmila Tagore shocked all and sundry by wearing a two-piece bikini in An Evening in Paris, but she has a very different approach towards daughter Soha Ali Khan and tells her how to fight off the minimal-clothes menace. “She told me that if producers want me to get into a bikini just because she did so once, I’m supposed to say, ‘My mom made some mistakes. I won’t repeat them’. There are some things which I don’t need to be told not to do, just as I’ve my own list of dos,” Soha said.
It took Soha’ glamorous mother quite a long time to go from Satyajit Ray to a glamorous double role in Shakti Samanta’s An Evening In Paris. But Soha is already there in less than a year and will be seen in a double role in Aparna Sen’s next. “And the best part is mom too is part of the film. So it will be great fun to shoot. It will also be my first film with a female director, and I’m really looking forward to being directed by a woman,” said Soha whose period love story Khoya Khoya Chand is ready to hit the screens soon.
Soha got rave reviews for her performance as the stifled bride in a feudal household in Rituparno Ghosh’s Antarmahal. She had a lot of difficult, explicit scenes with Jackie Shroff in the movie. “They may look difficult to the spectator. But they weren’t that tough to do. Rituda showed me exactly what to do. My co-star Jackie was far more nervous and embarrassed than I was. He told my mother he’d never be able to do those scenes if she was around on the sets. We took every precaution. Everyone except the immediate crew and cast was ordered out of the sets. Rituda took good care of me. It didn’t seem tough.”
Soha makes no bones about her aspirations as an actor. “I’m not too old in the industry, still finding my way around. I can’t say whether I’m cut out for Shaadi No. 1 or Antarmahal. Ideally, I’d like to do both kinds of cinema, just like my mom did. There are some things I won’t be comfortable doing. “Sometimes I feel I belong to another era. That’s when Antarmahal seems like my cup of tea. Then again I want to do a young contemporary girl’s role because that’s what I am in real life. In Rang De Basanti, I played a young college-going girl. I like that”.