Reporter turned screenwriter Basharat Peer has been talking to FirstPost about his first film venture, 'Haider' - Hamlet transposed to 1990s Kashmir. It's just about to go on release. Here's the link to the interview - and an extract:
Writing about Kashmiris as any people should be written about is all I have tried to do all my life as a writer. Curfewed Night was a response to caricatures of Kashmiris in Indian political writing; I wrote Haider in the same spirit, with the same feeling.
Our Hamlet is a history MPhil student, his father is a doctor, his evil uncle Claudius is a lawyer, his mother Gertrude is a school teacher. They don't live in a houseboat, but in regular houses. They fall in love, they betray, they make sacrifices, they fight back, they cry, the get angry, like human characters anywhere. They do find themselves dealing with external situations that are particular to Kashmir in the mid-1990s.
Writing about Kashmiris as any people should be written about is all I have tried to do all my life as a writer. Curfewed Night was a response to caricatures of Kashmiris in Indian political writing; I wrote Haider in the same spirit, with the same feeling.
Our Hamlet is a history MPhil student, his father is a doctor, his evil uncle Claudius is a lawyer, his mother Gertrude is a school teacher. They don't live in a houseboat, but in regular houses. They fall in love, they betray, they make sacrifices, they fight back, they cry, the get angry, like human characters anywhere. They do find themselves dealing with external situations that are particular to Kashmir in the mid-1990s.
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