Dholakia is all set to start the shooting of LAMHAA

Tahir Sayeed
Srinagar, Sep 17: After meeting the pro-freedom leaders earlier this year, renowned Bollywood director, Rahul Dholakia, is all set to start the shooting of his forthcoming film on Kashmir in Valley in the next few weeks.
The director had met chairmen of the Hurriyat conferences Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, other pro-freedom leaders including Shabir Shah, Mushtaq-ul-Islam, Asiya Andrabi , General Moosa and former militant commanders earlier this year and got apprised of the “actual situation” in the Valley.
The film titled, as “Lamha” will be based on the situation prevailing in the Valley for the past two decades and is the first of its kind movie where the director met the pro-freedom leadership before writing the story and the script of movie.
Sources close to Dholakia say that he has signed leading Bollywood actors Sanjay Dutt, Kunal Kapoor and Bipasha Basu for the lead roles in the movie. They said the Mumbai-based Kashmiri journalist Anil Raina helped him in organizing meetings with the pro-freedom leaders in Kashmir early of this year . They said Basu, who is playing the role of the lead actress, is learning Kashmiri language those days and Kashmiri girl is doing this job in Mumbai.
Sources say the Kashmiri pro-freedom leaders apprised Dholakia that a fallacious and misleading image of Kashmir was being portrayed in India and abroad, which was hurting the Kashmir cause. “Dholakia realized that Kashmiri aspirations needed to be portrayed in a just manner. He realized that Kashmiri sentiment was being misrepresented,” sources said. “Dholakia decided to make a film on Kashmir and represent the sentiment in true sense.”
They said Dholakia was in no way propagating the cause of militants but he wanted to portray the true situation in Kashmir which has been missing in the earlier films made on Kashmir.
Sources said that Rahul wants that his film should be different from other films like “Mission Kashmir and Tahhan “/
“Some Delhi-based Kashmiris, a few years back, had also informed me that Bollywood movies often misrepresented the Kashmir situation. Then I decided to make a movie of Kashmir and since then I have visited Kashmir many a time and experienced the situation on ground,” the director Rahul Dolakia Told Greater Kashmir.
“The movie will be a different from the other movies made on Kashmir. I hope Kashmiris will like it,” he said.
Dholakia had also made a movie, Parzania, on the Gujarat riots of 2002. He won the Best Director’s Award for “Parzania”.