“America ke paas Superman hai, Batman hai, Spiderman hai,” Amitabh Bachchan’s powerful voice booms as the trailer for R Balki’s Pad Man begins. “Lekin India ke paas Padman hai,” he concludes, as all eyes are on Akshay Kumar as Lakshmikant Chauhan. At the very outset, the trailer declares that Chauhan is no less a superhero than the international greats.
The Twinkle Khanna production is based on the low-cost sanitary pads manufacturer Arunachalam Muruganantham. Co-starring Radhika Apte and Sonam Kapoor, Pad Man scheduled to be released on January 26, 2018.
Much of the trailer shows Muruganantham’s journey through numerous snippets: his quest to create the perfect sanitary napkin, which even includes trying one on and wearing it for a few days, to his fight against the taboo against menstruation and his fall-out with his wife in the process.
Kumar also replicates Muruganantham’s riveting May 2012 TED talk in the film, where the Coimbatore resident, with his trademark humility and humour, told the world how a high-school dropout coming from poverty came to be wooed by top institutes like the Indian Institutes of Technology and Harvard to share his entrepreneurial journey. “I not study IIT. But IIT study me,” Kumar’s character says in spattering English.
“Bloody men. Half hour bleeding like woman, they will straight die,” he adds.
Pad Man will be distributed worldwide by Sony Pictures.