Parveen Babi. Illustration: Nuwan Chamika / Himal Southasian
Reviews
There is something about Parveen
The cultures of fame, shame, and fear in Bollywood’s tryst with mental health.
What feels like a chunk of my childhood was spent in complete awe of her. Parveen Babi.
Growing up in West Asia of the 1980s, renting Hindi film VCRs at the corner store was a hugely desi predilection: nostalgia and heartache and the stuff of phone calls/dinner party chatter for my parents, and a vision of an India for me, a country that I knew was home, real home, even though I had no real memories of it since I'd left at the age of two. Plonked in the middle of a desert, in an air-conditioned room, in front of a TV that played her movies as if on loop, I was enthralled.