Mumbai: Veteran film, television and entertainment journalist Piroj Wadia passed away in Mumbai on Monday afternoon. She had been unwell and was admitted at Parsi General Hospital for the past three weeks. The funeral is at the Towers of Silence at Kemps Corner on Tuesday at 7.45 a.m. She is said to have been in her 60s. An asthmatic since childhood, her breathing problem aggravated few weeks back and her health kept deteriorating thereafter. She died of septicaemia. Wadia worked for Cine Blitz magazine for a while and was also the editor of the now defunct TV and Video World magazine. Writer-producer-director Vinta Nanda remembers meeting her in the early 1990s. “I was doing the series Tara and she wanted to put me on the cover of the magazine; being a newcomer I nearly fainted on hearing it,” recollects Ms. Nanda.
Film journalist and city historian Rafique Baghdadi says, “When I met her, she smoked a lot. She went through the whole process of giving up smoking but then the damage was already done.” He credits her for her warmth and hospitality and the ability to make friends. “I think she had more friends than relatives,” he recalls.
For the last four years Wadia had been contributing a TV column for Nanda's www.thedailyeye.info .
Her last column appeared in the last week of May. “She was full of life and good energy, always full of beans,” says Ms. Nanda. Though Wadia lived alone and didn't have immediate family or relatives, a circle of friends, including Ms. Nanda, Dolly Thakore, Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal, Rinki Bhattacharya, Hill Sethna were always around for her. It was her close friends, Nina Goel and Delnaz, who brought her to the hospital and looked after her in her last days.
