Shabana Azmi's birthday cake creates controversy

‘Shabana Nagar: Galli No 60’. This was the cake that Shabana Azmi, who turned 60 last week, received from her lyricist-screenwriter husband Javed Akhtar. And the cake was presented to Shabana as a surprise gift at a party at a Juhu hotel in Mumbai, attended by Bollywood’s biggest names including the Bachchans.

The party is all over. But the controversy lingers on over the cake which was designed as a slum. It was apparently meant to represent her work for slumdwellers, but it sparked debates ranging from the representation of poverty in cinema to the way Bollywood’s glamorous view Mumbai’s slums.

Akhtar has now responded to the criticism, saying those who are griping have failed to get his “good humour”.

Important among the critics was Jockin Arputham, a winner of the Magsaysay Award. “I can’t believe that she was part of something like this...It is rather unpopular and against her simplicity,” said Arputham, who has worked with slumdwellers for nearly four decades.

Azmi too has crusaded for several years for affordable houses for slumdwellers. The cake, designed to look like a typical shanty-town with makeshift homes and open drains built of icing sugar, bore a signboard that said: ‘Shabana Nagar: Galli No 60’.