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Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone (pictured), who is essaying the character of a visually impaired girl in her upcoming film Lafange Parindey feels that this was the most challenging role of her acting career so far.
"To play a blind person when someone can see..to pretend to be blind despite having a vision...is really difficult. This is by far the most challenging role of my career," Deepika told PTI.
To get into the skin of Pinky Palkar, a dancer who is blind but ambitious and dances with roller skates on her feet, Deepika did some homework.
"I observed blind people... learnt how they react to surroundings... spent a lot of time with them. Also, scenes were rehearsed by being blindfolded and then re-rehearsed with eyes open to compare performances," she said.
"But for this, one needs to be focused and it requires lot of concentration. While skating...I had hurt myself a lot and suffered bruises," she added.
Directed by Pradeep Sarkar, Lafange Parindey, the latest offering of Yash Raj Films, stars Neil Nitin Mukesh and Deepika Padukone in lead roles and will release on August 20.
The movie is about bike gangs in Mumbai. Neil plays the character of One Shot Nandu, a fighter who pummels his opponents in the ring blindfolded. He teaches her to see and she teaches him how to love, the actress said.
Elaborating her role, the model-turned actress said, "She is a normal girl who has dreams...desires...wants to achieve something different in life."
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From NDTV in India:
