India's sanitary-pad-man Padma Shri Arunachalam Muruganantham tells mid-day how he was chased, coerced by Twinkle Khanna and Akshay Kumar into lending his story for Bollywood adaptation
Akshay Kumar and Twinkle Khanna
Akshay Kumar and Twinkle Khanna
After hounding Menstrual Man Padma Shri Arunachalam Muruganantham for months and finally convincing him to allow them to translate it for the big screen, Twinkle Khanna, Akshay Kumar and R Balki are all set to showcase 'Padman' to the world.
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Back in 1998, Muruganantham had sparked off a revolution when he developed, after much derision and social censure, a low-cost sanitary napkin machine. The machine is installed in 23 states in India and he is now counted among India's most inventive minds.
Arunachalam Muruganantham
Going by Bollywood's fluffy standards, wouldn't a biopic on him be considered taboo? Well, not when the man behind the film is R Balki, who made a house-husband look hip in Ki & Ka last year. When hitlist connected with Muruganantham, he was on cloud nine. "I couldn't be happier. Now, everyone will get to know about my hard work of two decades."
Calling the movie a fictionalised biopic, he adds, "They have taken the core of my story and set it in fiction, taking many instances and references from my experiences. It is not a quintessential biography, like Gandhi."
Twinkle, Akshay who?
Talking about how the film came about, he said, "This is not one of those movies that happened in a day or a week. It took us nearly one-and-a-half years to give it shape. A girl called Twinkle (Khanna) had been chasing me endlessly for rights. She tracked my every move. She desperately tried to reach me even when I was in Malaysia and the US. She finally caught me in London. My friends were curious about why Twinkle would want to meet me."
"It was only then that I learnt she is Rajesh Khanna's daughter. I remember telling her, 'Akshay Kumar has also been trying to get me for rights'. She laughed and said, 'Yes, he is my husband'."
Finally, Twinkle visited his house and workshop in Coimbatore. "She came with a man I'd never seen or heard of earlier. We had lunch and spoke at length about the story. The man wanted to smoke and I, as a rule, send all smokers downstairs. He was spotted by my neighbours, who told me the next day that he was renowned filmmaker Balki. Everyone knew him as he'd directed Kareena Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan."
Akshay came much later to his place. "He is extremely humble. The day I met him, I was going to a women's college for a lecture. He was hell-bent on tagging along. Twinkle stopped him as the project was in the early stages then and they didn't want the media to get a whiff of it."
Muruganantham said he was happy that Twinkle was present at all meetings. "Menstruation is an issue that women understand best, so it was easy to talk to her without elaborating how I went about creating the first set of napkins. I couldn't have done it with just two men."
Hollywood aspirations
Muruganantham had, however, always dreamt of a Hollywood movie on his life. "I rarely watch Hindi films, but after meeting Akshay, I watched 'Airlift' and 'Baby'. I didn't want to give the rights to anyone in India. I wanted this story to reach the world. But, I didn't have the heart to turn down Akshay and Twinkle," he said.
Will the film further the cause of women empowerment? "I am proud that for the first time in world cinema history, a mainstream male star will talk about menstruation and sanitary napkins in a full feature length Hindi movie. The story will be set in India's heartland, but the theme is universal. In the '90s, it was taboo to talk about periods; women would not even talk to their husbands about it. Now, with this film, we are taking the debate to the public to talk about female personal hygiene," he said.
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