Akshay Kumar has been demolishing patriarchal stereotypes with every film. If Jolly LLB 2 had him slaving over the stove as wife Huma Qureshi raved about his cooking, Toilet Ek Prem Katha had him as a man who wears the tag of ‘henpecked husband’ with pride. With Padman, he returns as a man who will bring about a social change because, well, he loves his wife, played by Radhika Apte.
As Padman’s first song, Aaj Se Teri, released Wednesday, it is clear that Akshay is pushing this agenda of gender reversal like other social change (Clean India campaign, menstrual hygiene) -- by presenting it as part of mainstream cinema, with enough entertainment to keep India’s ticket-buying janta happy.
Aaj Se Teri was unveiled Wednesday afternoon at a grand event in Mumbai. The song is written by Kausar Munir while Amit Trivedi has composed the music. Arijit Singh has lent his voice for the romantic number.
From customising a toy so that it chops onions sans tears to offering his “hard-earned” money to wife, Akshay does everything a good husband is expected to do. He wants to make the wife happy in her zone of course.
Padman is inspired by the story of Arunachalam Muruganantham - the man who started out by wanting to “please his wife” by replacing her rag cloth with a sanitary pad. The film captures his trials with making a cheap sanitary pad, his experiment with wearing one and using animal blood to test if it leaked and the hostile reaction of his community for talking openly about menstruation. A school drop out, Muruganantham now runs a company in Coimbatore in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, supplying women with sanitary pads in 4,500 villages and providing technology for his low cost hygiene products to 19 other countries.
{{/usCountry}}Padman is inspired by the story of Arunachalam Muruganantham - the man who started out by wanting to “please his wife” by replacing her rag cloth with a sanitary pad. The film captures his trials with making a cheap sanitary pad, his experiment with wearing one and using animal blood to test if it leaked and the hostile reaction of his community for talking openly about menstruation. A school drop out, Muruganantham now runs a company in Coimbatore in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, supplying women with sanitary pads in 4,500 villages and providing technology for his low cost hygiene products to 19 other countries.
{{/usCountry}}“I’m thrilled because the movie talks about a difficult subject in an entertaining manner and it will reach out to the masses,” the inventor of the low-cost sanitary pad making machine told the Reuters.
“I am hopeful that something that has been hidden in the darkness ... will finally be in the spotlight so that a young girl can go up to her parents and say that she needs sanitary pads over the ubiquitous fairness creams,” Twinkle Khanna, who wrote about the real-life Padman in a book and produced the film, said in an interview.
Directed by R Balki, the film also features Sonam Kapoor in a lead role. It is slated to hit theatres on January 26, 2018.
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