A Period Piece

One man’s small idea has meant a big leap for women’s hygiene, inspiring Bollywood to make a biopic starring Akshay Kumar

- Suhani Singh

ARUNACHALAM MURUGANANTHAM’S CURIOSITY and defiance have brought him both infamy and fame. “In the early marriage days, you try to impress your wife. I did the same,” says Muruganantham in the popular TED Talks video uploaded on YouTube. So he brought Shanthi a packet of sanitary napkins, after he saw her using a rag cloth which was so dirty he wouldn’t use it to clean his two-wheeler. Only Shanthi wasn’t thrilled that he’d cut into their monthly household budget. The Coimbatore-based school dropout and welder then decided to make a pad on his own. Unable to find volunteers in his family or in the local medical college to test his product, he became a guinea pig himself. This, Muruganantham claims, makes him the first man anywhere to wear a sanitary napkin. For five days, he fixed a rubber bottle filled with goat’s blood to his hip and connected it to a tube which led directly to the pad. “The messy days, the lousy days, that wetness. My God, it’s unbelievable. I bow down in front of any woman who goes through that,” said Muruganantham to applause from the TED Talks audience in Bengaluru.

It’s this candour mixed with a healthy dose of cheekiness that makes the inventor of the low-cost sanitary napkin machine an apt hero for a film. It’s also why he is the first person that actress-turned-author Twinkle Khanna thanked in her bestselling book of short stories, The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad. A fictionalised take on Muruganantham’s incredible journey is documented in Twinkle’s short The Sanitary Man from a Sacred Land. February 9 marks the release of Twinkle’s production,