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Taaha Shah, who was last seen in the YRF teen flick Luv Ka The End, stars in Karan Johar‘s adorable new movie Gippi! The young actor has quite the background, he left a successful career to take a chance at acting.
He was born in Abu Dhabi, the capital city of United Arab Emirates, to Shah Sikkander Badusha, an F.R.C.S. Orthopedic doctor and Mahnaz Sikkander Badusha (originally Margret Rose Matthews), a nurse. He has an elder sibling by one year, Abid who is a Civil Engineer. Taaha Shah‘s education has seen quite some globetrotting, to say the least. He studied at the Sherwood academy in Abu Dhabi till the 4th grade, then shifted to a boarding school called the Kodaikanal International School located at Tamil Nadu in India, where he continued his education for the next 3 years. Feeling homesick, he returned back to UAE but later shifted to Sharjah with his family, where he finished his schooling at Choueifat International School and Sharjah American School, but not with the brightest grades, as he says.
College life was short lived as he joined American University of Sharjah only for a Semester but dropped out of his Bachelor of Business Administration Course, as he “couldn’t find himself in it.” For 3 years since the age of 18 (2006), Taaha Shah worked in their businesses of Human Resource, Construction, Real Estate, Building Materials, Import / Export and as a hobby did a few modeling assignments. When the financial crisis hit, he decided to take a break and rethink where he stands and what will be his next step. Two months later he made a trip to Toronto, Canada to visit his brother for New years eve in 2009 and that’s where he decided to, as he says ‘Its time for Plan A and no Plan B cause Plan B makes you weak’, and dived into his dream. He took admission into and acting course in the New York Film Academy-School in Abu Dhabi a month later, which would set the pedestal to create his own history of sorts.
On completion of 6 months at NYFA, he was about to leave for Los Angeles to complete the remainder of his course. Fate had planned differently. His father suddenly thought Taaha should make a move to Mumbai first, his mom agreed and 2 weeks later Sep 2009 Taaha lands in Mumbai for a 2 days visit but little did they know, that Mumbai would never allow those 2 days to come to an end, as 9 months later, he found himself signing his Debut Film in the Lead with Yash Raj`s Y Films – Luv Ka The End, in which he starred as an
Anti-Hero, the first of its kind in the youth genre!
Now in Gippi, Taaha Shah stars as the hot older man in 14-year-old Gippi’s life. Gippi lives in Simla with her mother Pappi and little brother Booboo. She is overweight and awkward and doesn’t know how to handle the physical, emotional and social changes happening in her life. In school, she is a backbencher and is constantly bullied by the popular queen-bee Shamira. At home, she’s trying to figure out how to deal with living in a broken home. In the middle of all this chaos, she falls madly in love with an older, brooding heartbreaker, played by Taaha Shah. When her love story comes to a humiliating end, and she is publicly scorned, she decides to take her life in her hands and accepts Shamira’s challenge to stand against her in the school elections.
Whatever the final outcome might be, Gippi makes sure she has a great time in the journey, filling it with delicious desserts, funny teachers, school crushes, and Shammi Kapoor dances. Gippi is a coming-of-age story of an ordinary, overweight girl, who, through the course of the film, learns to love herself for exactly who she is. It is also a tale of an underdog, who picks herself up from nothing and finds herself at the top of her own little world. Keep it locked on Urban Asian for more on Gippi and Taaha Shah!
