During an interview, in 2016, Indian actor Shabana Azmi revealed the secret to her long-lasting and happy marriage to poet Javed Akhtar.

The Fire actor shared, “(The secret is) that Javed and I never meet. So where’s the question of fighting? Girls come up to me saying, ‘You’re married to a man who writes such romantic songs. How romantic must he be!’ I say he doesn’t have a single romantic bone in his body.”

Azmi went on, “His logic is, if you’re a circus artiste and if you perform trapeze, do you hang upside down in your own house too? There’s nothing romantic about our relationship. But it’s based on mutual respect and friendship.”

She added, “Javed often says, ‘Shabana is such a good friend of mine that even marriage couldn’t destroy our friendship’. We’re friends; we have the same world view. In many ways, he’s like my father. In fact our backgrounds are so similar; I often say that we could have had an arranged marriage.”