A Conversation With Amruta Subhash

In this moving conversation, Pooja meets Amruta Subhash, a National Award-winning actor and theatre director. This conversation is one between soulmates: it starts with tears, ends with tears and wanders through many worlds that have shaped Amruta’s life.Amruta speaks with candour and vulnerability: about directing and acting in her brilliant play, Asen Me Nasen Me — a gift from her husband and playwright Sandesh Kulkarni, based on her father’s descent into Alzheimer’s — and about grappling with her grandmother’s death and the guilt and desperation that followed.Amruta recounts the time theatre legend Satyadev Dubey threatened to slap her, even as Pooja likens her to a dragon unleashed when the camera rolls.Beyond this, the conversation is also a meditation in resilience and healing. Amruta talks about her transformation--being confined to a wheelchair at 23 to rebuilding her life piece by piece; about finding an unexpected father figure in playwright Vijay Tendulkar, who quietly nudged her toward therapy and healing. The two look back at Amruta’s acting journey, and how she grew up seeing her mother Jyoti Subhash transform from a bhakri-cooking homemaker to a force on stage — a metamorphosis that left her spellbound.Along the way, Amruta laughs about receiving a postcard from Aamir Khan that convinced her, as a young girl, she was meant to marry him; and how her first words weren’t speech at all, but song.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.