Saba Azad Amps Up Your Weekend - New Music, Shows, Reads And More

Maverick or glass onion? From music to movies and everything in between, Saba Azad offers up her top picks

- Vanessa Viegas

Wait, wait, wait. How many Saba Azads are there, anyway?

There's the poised, assured actor who played Parvana Irani, aka Pipsy, the lawyer and Homi J Bhabha's love interest in last year's SonyLiv webseries Rocket Boys. Then, there's the nutty singer in the decade-old electro-funk band MadBoy/ Mink, alongside actor and musician Imaad Shah. Rewind a bit. You'll find a theatre actor who'd been on stage since the age of five. And scroll a bit through Reels and posts. Here's another Saba Azad, her not-quite-smile waiting out paparazzi cameras as they zoom into her relationship with a famous action star (IYKYK).

Azad is clearly greater than the sum of her parts. "As someone with a limited attention span, it's marvellous being able to do so many of the things I love," she says. She acknowledges, a touch reluctantly, all the upsides of being more famous than before. "The best one can hope for is appreciation for your work and the respect of peers. Everything else is white noise."

That laser focus, and the ability to swipe seamlessly from one skill to another, was honed early. Azad comes from a family of theatre artists and academics. "I was on stage at about the same time as I learnt how to speak and walk," she recalls. "I was also part of the choir so music and acting went together." Her uncle, Safdar Hashmi, was a prominent playwright and was killed while performing a street play in support of workers' demands on the outskirts of Delhi in 1989. Fresh out of school, she adopted her maternal grandmother's pen name-Azad-as her stage name. For her, it simply stands for freedom.