Actress Barbara Mori had tuitions on Hindi everyday on the sets of Kites and no other than director Anurag Basu was at the helm of the affairs. He took the onus of teaching Hindi to Barbara, but little did Barbara know about what Anurag was teaching him.
For simple English words such as ‘good morning’ and ‘thank you’ Basu taught the actress bad words of Hindi. “Initially she didn’t realize that she was learning bad words. So she would come to say good morning to everybody on the sets and say the bad word instead that we had taught her and to top it she would say it to everyone on the sets and that too loudly,” exclaims Basu.
While initially Barbara didn’t realize she was doing something wrong, after observing everyone’s reaction for 2-3 days on the sets, she figured something was amiss. Later when the actress was told the fact she was zapped but took it very sportingly.
But this is not the end of the story. The cross cultural collaboration came about when Barbara too taught some unit members words in Spanish without telling them what the actual meaning was. “To settle cores with me and the team, Barbara would teach us Spanish words and never tell us the actual meaning of the words she taught us, but some of us were quick enough to surf the net and cross check whether what she was teaching was correct. By the end, we knew a lot of Spanish bad words and Barbara knew a lot of Hindi but only abuses,” says Anurag.
This is what you call an international collaboration in Anurag’s words!
