Divya Dutta launches memoir The Stars in My Sky in presence of Shabana Azmi, Gurdas Maan, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra

Divya Dutta launched her second book, The Stars in My Sky, published by Penguin Random House India, at an event held at the JW Marriott in Mumbai yesterday evening.

The book launch was attended by a few of the artistes and filmmakers with whom she has worked in the past, including directors Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, Sriram Raghavan, actor-singer Gurdas Maan, actress Shabana Azmi, writer-lyricist Javed Akhtar and Sameer Nair, CEO of Applause Entertainment.

Veteran actor Amitabh Bachchan has written the foreword of the memoir.

Dutta spoke about the amazing people she met on her journey to becoming an actress and dedicated her book to them. "Many times you don’t get an opportunity to let people know what you think of them," she said.

She went on to say, “We chat, we work together, but never do we get an opportunity to say, ‘Hey, listen, you really matter a lot to me.’ This book is for those very special people who mean the world to me.”

Her Train To Pakistan (1998) co-star and friend of 25 years, Rajit Kapur, moderated the event. Meanwhile, Mehra, Raghavan and Maan all shared their experiences of working with Dutta. In Mehra's Delhi-6 (2009), the filmmaker cast her against type as a Dalit girl Jalebi. Calling her “humble” and “fearless”, Mehra lauded her approach to cinema. She won the IIFA award for Best Supporting Actress in 2010 for her performance.

The Stars in My Sky features many chapters to these collaborators who have contributed to Dutta’s career along the way. The actress was touched that her mama [maternal uncle] Deepak Bahry, a film director who introduced her to feature films was also in attendance.

Dutta read out a portion of the preface that explains what drove her to write the book in the first place. Finally, Azmi, who plays her mother in the short film Sheer Qorma (2020), added that it takes a confident person to write a book like The Stars in My Sky.

“An actor’s business is to observe and store because you never know when you can mine that information,” the award-winning veteran actress explained. “When you have the generosity to include so many people as stars in your sky, it comes because you acknowledge that they have played such an important role in your life.”

Dutta's first book, Me & Ma, published in 2017, was a memoir about her late mother, Nalini.