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Minissha Lamba

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‘I finally got my degree!’, exclaimed actress Minissha Lamba while receiving a copy of her admission form, as she visited Miranda House along with Saif Hassan to discuss their play Mirror Mirror.

It was a sunny afternoon in the calm and ambient campus of Miranda House. The Heritage Hall of the college started to get filled by the evening. The reason for this crowd was a Master Class, a series of talks and discussions by Saif Hyder Hassan and Minissha Lamba, the director and lead actress of the play Mirror Mirror which will soon have an exclusive performance out here in Miranda House.

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The idea was that both Hassan and Lamba would attend the event together but the actress missed her flight so she made an appearance about an hour later. The principal gleefully recalled how in Minissha, an alumnus of the same college used to bunk or attend classes late. One can say that some things never change. The discussion was initiated with Saif Hassan who talked in great detail about failures that life gives us and how we need to face them, citing several personal examples. He talked about how while growing up, subjects like mathematics were his Kryptonite and how his father used to consider him a ‘dramebaaz’ (the dramatic one), which ironically, he went on to become in the future.  Casually dressed in an orange tee, he went on to utter snippets of wisdom that he has picked up like ‘Being critical is good. Being over critical is plain stupid’ and ‘Don’t take anybody seriously except…yourself.’

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All heads were turned towards the door on the right when Minissha made an entry. She walked up to the stage with grace and laughingly apologised for her late appearance. She talked about her journey as an actress, the high and lows that performers have to face and how there are different thrills for getting to act on stage as well as the screen. An interesting aspect of acting she pointed out was that not all actors need to be exactly like their characters, just paint a realistic and believable picture. The very essence of acting is for the actor ‘to act’ like someone making the audience feel that the actor and the someone is one or the same thing.  To take a trip down memory lane, the principal also gave Minissha a printout of her original admission form. The funny thing was at first glance, Minissha thought this is her college degree (even though she left the college in the middle of her course back in the day) and yelled out ‘OH! I’M FINALLY GETTING MY DEGREE!’. This resulted in a roar of laughter in the hall.

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A lot of people amongst the crowd were drama enthusiasts or members of the theatre society so naturally the concept of on-stage acting was also heavily discussed. Saif felt that there is a misconception that theatre is eroding. He added that in fact, cities like Delhi have given birth to diverse and modern concepts that can be portrayed on stage. ‘Theatre is the new romance. Right now, things seem to be good, it is like theatre is having a honeymoon phase.’ All in all, it was an amusing event for enthusiasts of creativity and this has just set the ground for the ‘Mirror Mirror’ that is to be held at the auditorium tomorrow.

Image Credits – Aakarsh Gupta and Adithya Khanna for DU Beat.

Shaurya Singh Thapa 

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