Sometimes best friends, sometimes pillars of strength and sometimes competitors — the sisterly bond has been portrayed in many hues on TV. The new show Meri Awaaz Hi Pehchaan Hai takes you on a different journey of two sisters on a fiercely competitive musical journey. Sangeeta Yadav met the actors in Mumbai to tell you more
It’s not always easy for actors to portray complex characters and relationships, especially when they have to play someone famous and live every moment of it with conviction.
Meri Awaaz Hi Pehchaan Hai is one such new show on &TV where you’ll get to see actors going through the transformation in real life to give the audience a real feel good factor. From veteran Bollywood actors like Deepti Naval and Zarina Wahab to Amrita Rao and Aditi Vasudev, the entire troupe underwent months of rigourous singing training to do this musical drama. You ask them to sing a few lines and they quickly clear their throat and start the hum.
“I said yes to this show because it’s completely different from whatever I see on TV. It’s a story that delves into the relationship of two sisters —Kalyani and Ketaki Gaikwad— who are committed to music, out of which arises the conflict and tension between them. I am happy being the elder Kalyani Gaikwad. The story starts with us and ends with us but a chunk of the serial portrays our youth played by Amrita Rao and Aditi Vasudev,” Deepti Naval tells you. She was last seen on TV in Colors’ Mukti Bandhan in 2011.
Grapevine has it that this show is loosely based on the life of lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle. Amrita Rao, who plays the younger version of Kalyani Gaikwad in this finite telly series shot in a filmy manner, brushes aside such talk. “It’s a fictional story of two sisters who became famous singers. The situation these characters go through are entirely different,” Rao says.
Naval had been a singer in her childhood but singing took a backseat to her acting ambition. This show, she says, has given her a great opportunity to relive her singing days, that too at age 69. “At this stage of my life, I feel that I just want to learn music and this has come true with Meri Awaaz Hi Pehchaan Hai. I was learning music from the age of five to 11. Now it is like starting from scratch,” Naval says.
Rao, on the other hand, considers herself an amateur and worked hard to hit the right notes. “My singing is very melodious. That’s why, given a choice, I would want to sing a retro song. My training started three years ago and I’m still learning how to play the sitar from Ustad Mansoor Khan and sing Hindustani classical from Ustad Harsh Vyas,” Amrita says. Her Bollywood commitments include Satsang, a film she has signed up with Prakash Jha.
A common thread connecting these actors to their characters is their artistic background. “I’ve never played any character in my life which is legendary or iconic or illustrious or talented. Yet I can relate to it as an artist. They go through the same challenge and experience a lot of distractions with fame. People want to commercialise you and make money out of you and distract you from your focus to give 100 per cent to your passion. So that I think is something that even the audience will realise,” Rao explains.
Being a painter, scriptwriter, actor, director and photographer, Naval always had an inclination towards artistic fields. But the seeds of an artist were sowed by her parents. “Inspiration has come from many people around me. First in America, when I heard singers like Barbara Streisand and when I saw amazing performances in films like Taxi Driver and Godfather. But the biggest inspiration has been my father, who was a writer and my mother, who was into painting. He has been my teacher and gave me a lot of strength. He instilled in me the yearning to learn and be a student for life, to explore something new and walk the road less travelled. He told me that there are no full stops in life. You have to go on. There is so much there to do. Something must inspire you,” Naval says.
Having brought up listening to Urdu, Naval feels it’s so melodious that it made her inclined towards music. “While spending my childhood days in Amritsar, we used to hear lahore radio all the time. I have always found Urdu language very musical. We grew up listening to the songs of Reshma, Gulam Ali, lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, Mukesh Kumar and Kishore Kumar. You can’t take that out of us. This serial is connecting us back to who we are inner-most,” Naval tells you.
Having connected to so many artistic fields, Naval feels that it’s the writer which is very close to her heart.
“Why I keep doing different things is because for me it’s important for me to express myself through whichever medium is at my hand. As a writer it’s much closer. The writer in me is my true self. Whereas the actor in me is like a prop who is playing varied lives. Two of my books are in the pipeline. I will definitely write my memoirs one day,” Naval signs off.