Urwa and Mawra recently opened up about their career and how they feel while reading negative comments or how they take the criticism.
Let’s start with their sirnames! They spell their surnames with a ‘c’ and five years into building their careers, Twitter still can never forget this. They stated, “Memes and jokes continue to pop up frequently, with plenty of extra ‘c’s added in to the captions! “It’s hilarious,” grins Urwa. “There was this one line that read, ‘Urwa Hocane and Mawra Hocane are cute cisters’.”
I remind them of another image that had led to unlimited internet jokes — of Farhan and Urwa featured in a furniture ad. Farhan was, inevitably, Farhan ‘Caeed’ and the sofa was a ‘cofa’. “Great, someone’s having fun. I’m glad. Some of these memes are so creative!” Urwa shrugs good-naturedly.
“We actually share a lot of these jokes with each other and laugh over them,” agrees Mawra.
Urwa continues, “You see, when you’re active on social media, it means that you will get a lot of love from your fans and you’ll be able to connect with them. On the other hand, there will also be trolling. It’s all about perspective, you could think that the glass is half-full or half-empty. I have always visualised it to be half-full.”
“And I, full-full,” Mawra chimes in. “Even when it’s empty, I’ll think that it’s full and I’ll keep going.”
It’s a very positive approach but what do they do during the inevitable slumps that are part of every actor’s career? What about when, having wrapped up projects, they are twiddling their fingers at home, waiting for the next great role to come their way? “We find something else to do,” Urwa says.
“I’m producing my first movie, Tich Button, and she has completed her studies and has become an advocate.”
“All our lives, we’ve never been free,” observes Mawra. “When we were in our early teens, we’d rush from school to the theatre, to do our homework and then fall asleep, exhausted. We’d always be taking some lesson or the other, learning how to play the guitar or trying out kathak dance. To date, we always have so many plans that we’re always working on.”
One of these ‘plans’ is about to be realised, in the form of a clothing line created by the two sisters, called ‘UXM’, featuring casual Western-wear and accessories. “The tagline for the brand is, ‘The girls who can’, and it defines us in a lot of ways,” says Urwa. “There are times when we buy our daily wear from abroad or get it stitched specially and people ask us where we bought it from. That’s the aesthetic that we are bringing to the brand.”
Mawra adds, “It’s going to be a reflection of our personalities and the way the two of us dress on a daily basis.”
While replying about the question being asked that what if their brand is not liked by everyone or what if they were attacked on social media with all the negative comments, they replied , “No, it’s not like we don’t care when we are attacked on social media,” says Mawra. “I don’t care if my wardrobe isn’t liked, but of course it hurts if someone attacks my family. The first time I was trolled, it was very upsetting and I have seen my co-actors crying over social media controversies. There have also been times when I have addressed trolls and it hasn’t been because they are important but because I feel that I matter. I can’t let people go off and say whatever they want.”
“We have become thick-skinned,” agrees Urwa, “but I do get the feeling that people have tried to put us down simply because we are brave. We haven’t created special social media personas for ourselves. We don’t measure our words when we write a post on Twitter so that we remain politically correct. I’d like to believe that we are wise and correct just the way we are. But just the fact that we are comfortable with projecting who we really are is something that a lot of people are unable to accept.”
They both announced their new brand in a post and we just wish both of them all the best for this new venture!
