What! A third column on one book? Yep, first time in eight years of writing this weekly column that I’ve chosen to do this. It’s because Anubha Yadav’s revelatory book, Scripting Bollywood: Candid Conversations with Women who write Hindi Cinema, combines three great lifelong passions of mine—film, women’s perspectives and writing. Yadav has interviewed 14 women Hindi film writers—Shama Zaidi, Sai Paranjpye, Juhi Chaturvedi, Honey Irani, Sooni Taraporevala, Tanuja Chandra, Sabrina Dhawan, Kamna Chandra, Kalpana Lajmi, Urmi Juvekar, Bhavani Iyer, Shibani Bathija, Devika Bhagat and Sanyuktha Chawla Shaikh for the book, published by Women Unlimited, an associate of Kali for Women, Rs 675.

Writer-director Sooni Taraporevala (Salaam Bombay! Mississippi Masala, The Namesake, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, Yeh Ballet) is an Academy (Oscar) member. She supported herself while studying film and photography at Harvard, by working as a cocktail waitress and even as a security guard. Her very first film script for Salaam Bombay! directed by Mira Nair, won an Oscar nomination and won the Camera d’Or at Cannes. Her one mantra for good dialogues is good research: when researching for Mississippi Masala, she travelled around the American South, went to Africa, returned to Mississippi, and then wrote the dialogues.