Producer HumaraMovie’s latest web series The Story of Nukkad exists because of two reasons. One is that its director, Kireet Khurana, is h...
Producer HumaraMovie’s latest web series The Story of Nukkad exists because of two reasons. One is that its director, Kireet Khurana, is hugely fond of the television series that was broadcast on Doordarshan in the 1980s. The other is that the iconic show’s co-creator and co-director Saeed Akhtar Mirza is Khurana’s neighbour.
Mirza and Khurana live in an apartment block in Mumbai’s Bandra neighbourhood. “Saeed is my next-door neighbour, and when the lockdown happened, he was getting bored at home,” Khurana explained. “We were chatting and decided to do a couple of series together.”
One is the upcoming Gyani Ban Gaya Deshdrohi, in which Mirza, architect Romi Khosla and actor Puja Swarup chat about the state of the nation over the video conferencing app Zoom. The other is up on YouTube. The Story of Nukkad is a weekly series in which Mirza revisits the making of the hugely popular serial.
Telecast on Doordarshan in 1986 and 1987, Nukkad explored the lives and experiences of a cross-section of working-class characters. Drawn from different religions and in various stages of employment, the fictional residents of the Mumbai neighbourhood represented the diversity of India itself. From a tea seller to an alcoholic, an electronic shop owner to a tobacconist, a...
