Charlie Hebdo at the Kalakar Awards
Nandana Sen made Charlie Hebdo the star of the show in an award ceremony. The feisty actress, who is also a well-known human-rights activist, was recently honoured with the prestigious Kalakar Award for Best Actress, previously won by sensitive actresses like Nandita Das, Deepti Naval, and Rani Mukherjee.
In her acceptance speech for the Best Actress Award for her much-lauded performance in Ketan Mehta’s “Rang Rasiya,” whose theme is creative freedom, Nandana stated that “by honouring Rang Rasiya, this award honours not just a performance but the greater cause of free speech and expression, now under enormous threat everywhere, as shown by the horrifying Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris. The need to protect our creative freedom – whether we are painters or political cartoonists, actors or journalists, film-makers or novelists – is more urgent now than ever.” Great to meet an actress with a social conscience, who lives in the real world, and says it like it is.
