Friday, March 2, 2018

Shoba Narayan's "The Milk Lady of Bangalore"

Shoba Narayan is an award-winning author and columnist. Her books include Return to India: an immigrant memoir, Monsoon Diary: a memoir with recipes, and the newly released The Milk Lady of Bangalore: An Unexpected Adventure.

Narayan graduated from the Columbia Journalism School which awarded her a Pulitzer Fellowship; and is an alumnus of Mount Holyoke College and Women’s Christian College.

Here she dreamcasts an adaptation of The Milk Lady of Bangalore:
The hardest part about making my book into a movie is to figure out who will play the main character, which is the cow, Anandalakshmi. We have had dogs act in movies, but not necessarily cows. For this reason, my book will have to be an animated movie. I would love the voice of my cow to be emoted by either Whoopi Goldberg or Chris Rock, preferably both because who is to say that cows have to follow our human protocol and have just a single-gender voice.

My Milk Lady, Sarala, can only be played by an Indian actress and for that I would choose Shabana Azmi, whose aura and work I love. In the film, Morning Raga, she transformed herself into a conservative South Indian aunty. I bet she’d have fun transforming herself into a milk woman.

As for who would play me, a girl can dream, can’t she? I love Isabella Rossellini and would love to see her morph into a middle-aged cranky Indian woman. The other actress I adore is Priyanka Chopra. Watch her in the film, Barfi, to see how she turns into a totally non-glamorous woman-- and what a killer performance.
Visit Shoba Narayan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue