HER deeply captivating features coupled with her colourfully gleaming eyes may sweep you off your feet at the first sight. But this enchantingly beautiful lady is about much more. Talent, charisma and intellectual charm, for instance. She is our very own Atiqa Odho whose interests in movies, music and books are as colourful as her glittering personality.
Her taste in movies is not confined to any particular genre, rather it is very diversified. She can enjoy watching any sort of movies, provided it has a powerful subject and is dealt with in a mature way.
The kind of movies she watches depends upon the mood she is in. When she is in deeper mood, she watches parallel or art cinema that has a thought-provoking theme. When she is all effervescent and full of life, trying to have herself purely entertained, she watches some purely commercial flick. These commercial movies can be even Hollywood, Bollywood or Lollywood!
She says most of the people do not confess that they are being charmed by the magic of Bollywood commercial cinema, but actually most of the people just love this particular genre of films. She too enjoys mega-budget Bombay productions.
As a child, she simply loved the Pakistani movie Aaina starring the most talked about Lollywood couple of the past — Nadeem and Shabnam. She likes the way the drama is being crafted in a very simple and unaffected way.
From the present brood of hits, she appreciates A Beautiful Mind for the concept that it delivers. She describes Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula as a painting where you have a lot of artistic connotations and even though it is a very old story, Coppola has woven it into a very fine piece of art and has crystallized in it the matter that is worth spending time upon. She also loves Bridget Jones’s Diary because it is “such a cute movie” and deals with the life of a girl in a very humorous yet effective way. Chicago is also on her list of favourites.
She has more or less the same approach towards music, listening to all kinds and genres regardless of language, nationality or culture. By her own account, she is a great music buff and possesses a huge collection of music “from almost every part of the world.” She appreciates the fact that music reflects a lot of cultural influences and that is what she like about it.
She loves listening to a musical piece that has some sort of cultural or traditional touch in some way or the other. Whenever she travels, she makes sure that she get herself acquainted with the music of that particular region and bring back a stock of CDs to be added to her impressive musical collection.
Nowadays she seems to be possessed by the passionate touch of Arabian music. The hypnotizing rhythms and beats of Arabian music are a part of most of her foot-tapping moments these days. She also allots a significant amount of admiration to English music and loves everything from showtime music to opera, with Fleetwood Mac being her most favourite international band.
As for the local music scene, she listens to almost everything from Qawwali and mystic music to pop and rock, which is again an indication of her richly diversified taste. Among her favourite Pakistani musicians, Abida Parveen tops the list for the “sublime passion with which she renders her verses and infuses an exotic life into the words” that come out of her mouth.
Abida Parveen is followed, in that order, by Reshma and Mehdi Hasan. Among the new brood of pop musicians she brands Fuzon as fantastic for its originality and melodic appeal. Ali Azmat as a solo singer also sounds soulful to her ears. “The song that he has sung recently has already taken the airwaves of the subcontinent as well as the other parts of the world by storm and he rightly deserves this kind of recognition,”she says. Across the border, where there is hardly any pop-rock industry, she likes their commercial film music.
Again, while reading books she doesn’t draw any distinction between different kinds of books, and reads almost every kind and type. However, she simply loves autobiographies because she takes interest in people and in their ways of life. “I love to get into a person’s mind and try to find out what makes him/her tick,” she explains.
One book that has been her all-time favourites and she would like to recommend to others, too, is Geisha by Minesko Iwasaki, which, though a fiction, is based on a true story. “It is a complete sellout piece. It narrates the story of a girl who becomes a geisha — a Japanese woman who is trained to entertain men with her charms and the dancing art,” she points out.
She also enjoyed reading Dr Jone Gray’s Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. “It has a very hilarious tone, yet the subject that is being dealt with is very serious. It gives you a very honest and to-the-point gender perspective, and very tastefully acknowledges the fact that men and women are, and have always been, different from each other.”
In terms of Urdu literature, Atiqa says she is reading Manto’s short stories these days, and recommends the offerings to her fans.
FAVOURITE MOVIES: Aaina and Bridget Jones’s Diary
FAVOURITE SINGER: Abida Parveen
FAVOURITE BOOKS: Geisha and Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus
HER deeply captivating features coupled with her colourfully gleaming eyes may sweep you off your feet at the first sight. But this enchantingly beautiful lady is about much more. Talent, charisma and intellectual charm, for instance. She is our very own Atiqa Odho whose interests in movies, music and books are as colourful as her glittering personality.
