The Common Man's Hero

The shedding of the Khiladi avatar for the dramatic mantle of a common man, with infusions of humour, has been a rewarding career move for Akshay Kumar.

- Maithili Rao

Should you call it the power of cinema? Of reel life anticipating what could happen in real life? We often underestimate the reach and effect of pop culture — which in India mainly means Bollywood — and how it is quick to catch the zeitgeist and capitalise on it, by bending a current issue to fit the formulaic mode (which itself is changing in its setting and narrative tropes). A woman in Ajmer got a divorce from her husband, citing the lack of a toilet at home, a couple of weeks after the release of Toilet Ek Prem Katha. This happened four years after marriage. Apparently, her husband was not cast in the mould of Akshay Kumar, who defies his orthodox Brahmin father and mounts a crusade against the outraged men of his village to build a toilet in his yard for his beloved wife, who has walked out on him, despite theirs being a love marriage.So here’s the knight on a bike to the rescue of women in rural India, who have lumped their fate of using fields to take a dump before the crack of dawn. Since the premise of this film is the indignity of open defecation (obviously, women are the worst sufferers) and how to eradicate it under Modi’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, it follows that the humour is mostly scatological. It takes the talent of a Juhi Chaturvedi to write screenplays around bodily functions (and fluids) with wit, understanding and without being offensive. The writers here are Sidharth Singh and Garima Wahal, who acknowledge basing their story on an incident in Madhya Pradesh.