Kabuliwala to be recreated?

Sunil Doshi is all set to collaborate with filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, actress Sharmila Tagore, French screenplay writer Jean Claude Carriere and ad filmmaker-lyricist Piyush Pandey to reinvent short stories for cinema and television. Doshi wants to recreate Rabindranath Tagore’s character named Kabuliwala from his iconic short story of the same name. If we can rework Shakespeare, why can't we contemporise Tagore?" asks Doshi.

Kabuliwala is a unique father-daughter tale. The original story features Kabuliwala as a middle-aged dry fruit seller from Kabul who befriends a little girl named Mini. Five-year old Mini reminds him of his own daughter Amina who stays in Afghanistan. However Doshi’s ‘Kabuliwala‘ is supposed to be a theatre owner from Kabul whose wife and daughter get killed by Taliban. "He's smuggled into Kolkata by an Afghan woman who's into burqa boxing and he goes from house to house with his bioscope showing children films, which is how he meets his Mini. We're targeting a 2015 release for our film," says Doshi. "And there she finds out that the boys are 50-year-old musicians but one has a 24-year-old son and there begins a journey of music, love and family," says Doshi. "If Q and A could be adapted into the Oscar winning Slumdog Millionare, why not such stories?," he says.

Tapan Sinha’s Kabuliwala released in Bengali won National Award in1957. Hemen Gupta’s Kabuliwala, produced by Bimal Roy released in 1961 and emerged as a hit. Now let’s wait and watch what Doshi’s Kabuliwala does?