'Toilet: Ek Prem Katha'

"In my ancestral village, I still have to go to the fields with a lota," says debutante director Shree Narayan Singh, whose film, 'Toilet: Ek Prem Katha', deals with the issue of open defecation in the country. The film has been hit with a series of plagiarism charges since it grabbed headlines. Dealing with the negative attention was challenging for the filmmaker, who tells mid-day, days after a Jaipur court rejected a plea seeking a stay on the release of the film, that the accusations angered him. "How is the idea plagiarised," he questions, adding that the story was registered at the Film Writers Association in 2014, soon after writers Sidharth and Garima approached him with the subject. "The subject of sanitation is a common one. How can people claim it's theirs? Consider the number of movies made on a rich girl falling in love with a poor boy. Are they all copies of one other?"