Sai Paranjpye is en route someplace – she always is. In between getting from one point to the next somewhere in Pune where she lives part o...
Sai Paranjpye is en route someplace – she always is. In between getting from one point to the next somewhere in Pune where she lives part of the year, Paranjpye offers a crisp and jocular account of her latest project: the English translation of her Marathi-language autobiography. Instructions to her driver mesh seamlessly with a phone interview about the art of self-memorialising, the importance of humour in her works and the question of mortality, now all the more important in our coronavirus-infected times.
Paranjpye, who is 82 but sounds a few decades younger, produced her first literary work when she was eight. It was a set of fairy tales for children in Marathi. The multi-lingual multihypenate has scripted and directed plays, films, documentaries, and television serials for children and grown-ups alike over her decades-long career. Sparsh, Chashme Buddoor and Katha are among the best-regarded films of the 1980s. She has written and staged several plays, including Sakhe Shejari, Jaswandi and Maza Khel Mandu De, and directed the television serials Ados Pados and Chhote Bade in the 1980s.
In 2016, Paranjpye wrote Saya: Majha Kalapravas. A bestseller now its fifth edition, the autobiography was begging to be translated. Rather than hand over the task to a professional, Paranjpye decided to do it herself.
As it turns out, A Patchwork Quilt – A Collage of My Creative Life...
