There is something especially wholesome about one drama queen – a literal drama queen, not a spoilt diva – celebrating a fellow drama queen for the world to see. Sania Saeed encapsulated that sentiment perfectly in a throwback Nadia Afgan clip on her Instagram stories.

Putting up a hilarious clip of Nadia in character struggling to read aloud from a piece of paper, Sania captioned, “Long before Suno Chanda’s Shahana. She was so good! The inimitable Nadia Afgan.”

Self-deprecatingly, Sania added, “Visual representation of how I speak in Urdu,” alongside a crying with laughter emoji.

Nadia’s portrayal of the fun-loving, witty matriarch Shahana in Suno Chanda and its subsequent sequel Suno Chanda 2 captured the hearts of all drama-lovers looking for a feel-good story. However, as Sania was at pains to point out, Nadia had made a name for herself long before immortalising Shahana on screen. Nadia started out her career in the nineties and after a string of minor roles, she rose to prominence after landing a part in Shashlik in 2000, which was later re-aired in 2011.

Sania herself, meanwhile, is also no slouch in the showbiz world, and has been active in television and theatre since the nineties. She made her cinematic debut in 2015 in Manto, a biopic based on the life of writer Saadat Hassan Manto.

In addition to sharing a love of acting, however, both Sania and Nadia share a joint love of animals, and are vocal about promoting animal rights on talk shows and social media. Last month, Nadia used her Instagram handle to raise awareness about stray dogs being brutally killed on the streets. Similarly, Sania recently publicly spoke about how parents can model kindness to animals. “People don’t respect their kids; you cannot think that they will be empathetic towards animals either,” she said.

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