Main Adakara Banun Gi

Main Adakara Banun Gi is a play being staged at The Arts Council from June 6 – 9, 2009 from 8:30 pm – 11:00 pm. It is a two-person cast featuring Sania Saeed & Ehteshamuddin. Tickets are available at The Arts Council, Agha’s Supermarket and Raintree Spa at The Forum.

The play has been inspired by ‘Educating Rita’  and is written by Baber Jamal. It revolves around two individuals, a young female student (Sania Saeed) who hails from the Peela (yellow) school culture and is eager to learn acting, and another a veteran actor and teacher (Ehteshamuddin).

The production is being held as a fundraiser for the Rotary Club of Karachi who will use the funds to provide artificial limbs (a la Jaipur Foot) to those who need them. These will be provided free of charge to those who have lost their limbs due to disasters, disease or amputation.

Having seen many of Sania Saeed’s plays, we all know what a versatile and talented actress she is – she has been in plays like Zebunnisa, Aahat, Kya Khoya Kya Paya, Balcony, Khamoshian, Jhumka Janan and many others.

I have met Sania Saeed a few times in the past and have always been impressed by her bubbly enthusiasm, her commitment to any task that she takes on, her passion for theatre and the arts, her down-to-earth nature, her amiable personality and of course her intelligence.

When Rabia Garib, Editor-in-Chief of CIO Pakistan, asked bloggers if they would like to get together with Sania Saeed to talk about her new play, I jumped at the opportunity and suggested to Rabia that we should put together a special segment of “In the Line of Wire” in which we could have Sania talk about her play, about theatre in general, and about her perception of technology. Rabia and I then decided that the other bloggers who were coming over – Jamal Ashiqain, Fariha Akhtar and Sana Saleem – should all be co-hosts of this episode of ITLoW. The more we thought about it, the more excited we got.

The set was changed a bit to accommodate Sania, all the hosts and Shahzad Qureshi (he was there representing Rotary Club of Karachi and NOT Tohfay.com). And voila we were on the way!

Well maybe not quite. Since Shahzad had been pulled out from another commitment, it took him forever to show up. We didn’t really mind because we got a chance to talk informally with Sania and learn more about what makes her tick.

She is such a delightful young woman. We talked about everything – from her 7 cats, to her belief that technology had become very invasive, to her need for  private space and alone time and so much more.

One of the things we learnt about her was that she couldn’t have an effective conversation on the phone unless she knew the person she was talking to and could visualize them. Her best communication took place when she was face-to-face with someone.  Sania is a very private person and yet she doesn’t come across as such. She always has a ready smile and she chatted with us with such ease that it felt like we had known her for the longest time.

She told us stories about people coming up to her at her neighbourhood supermarket, mothers wanting babies to be photographed with her, old women associating her with a character she had played, people in general who had grown with her. It was amazing, Sania said, when she realized how her acting, the emotions the parts she played evoked, and how a smile or a lack of one can mean so much to someone else. It makes an actor realize the level of responsibility he or she has.

Sania has been acting since she was a child and she takes her profession very seriously. We asked her how difficult it was to play a role, to get into character. Did she actually become the person she was playing? Her answer was that she lived with the character, identified with the character, became at home with the character but she didn’t actually become the character. What we hadn’t realized was how difficult it must be for an actor to stop being the character they were playing, to let the character go, to walk away.

I hope you enjoy our conversation with Sania Saeed. We certainly did. And if you are a Karachiite, or happen to be in the city this weekend, do go and watch the play “Main Adakara Banun Gi”. It is on from June 6 – 9 at The Arts Council in Karachi from 8:30 pm – 11:00 pm.