'PadMan': Muruganantham, the Coimbatore innovator whose life is now a Bollywood film

While Kollywood missed out on making a film about this man who made cost-effective sanitary napkins, Bollywood has grabbed the opportunity.
'PadMan': Muruganantham, the Coimbatore innovator whose life is now a Bollywood film
'PadMan': Muruganantham, the Coimbatore innovator whose life is now a Bollywood film
Written by:

The trailer for Akshay Kumar's PadMan based on the inspiring life of Arunachalam Muruganantham, an innovator obsessed with the idea of creating cost-effective sanitary pads, is out and has garnered over 20 million views to date. The film also stars Radhika Apte and Sonam Kapoor.

In a country where menstruation is still spoken of as a shameful secret, PadMan follows the extraordinary journey of a Coimbatore school drop-out who made it his life's mission to provide low-cost sanitary napkins to poor women across rural India.

Superman, Batman and Deadpool are going to have to share their limelight with him come January 2018.

Though Muruganantham is from Tamil Nadu, PadMan will be set in Madhya Pradesh. The Tamil film industry has missed the bus and Bollywood has eagerly grabbed the opportunity.

The unconventional subject can be attributed to the fact that the idea was pushed by Twinkle Khanna. The film has been conceptualised by Twinkle and will be the first production that’s going to roll out of her newly launched production house, ‘Mrs Funnybones Movies’.

Muruganantham, also known as ‘India’s Menstrual Man’, has already been widely documented and reported about by both the Indian and international media. Twinkle herself has based the story ‘The Sanitary Man from a Sacred Land’ in her new book The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad on this Padma Shri winner.

Well, why wouldn’t the amazing journey of a school drop-out who now lectures at Harvard, besides IITs and IIMs back home, make for an engaging film? The guy is now rubbing shoulders with Bill Gates and James Cameron no less.

Image courtesy: Facebook/Muruganantham with Bill Gates

Image courtesy: Facebook/Muruganantham with James Cameron and wife

Here are some interesting facts from Muruganantham’s life:

  • Muruganantham wanted to provide a clean, low-cost sanitary pad for his wife after discovering that she used dirty unhygienic rags
  • He experimented by making pads out of cotton, which did not work
  • He used his experiments on his wife and sisters to check if his indigenous pads were effective but they refused to continue using them after a few trials
  • Muruganantham approached female medical students to try out his product, but they were shy and refused He then decided to wear the sanitary pad himself
  • Muruganantham went around with a pad in his underwear and a bottle filled with animal blood, which would squeeze out the blood on to the pad at regular intervals
  • His neighbours started calling him a ‘pervert’ and his wife decided to leave him hoping it would bring him back to his senses, and even served him a divorce notice
  • After 2 years of research and findings, Muruganantham figured out how to procure the exact material he needed and the process to manufacture a good quality sanitary pad at home
  • Muruganantham’s low-cost sanitary pad making machines are now sold across India and are even being procured internationally
  • In 2014 Time magazine featured him as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world

Watch Muruganantham's TED Talk in Bengaluru here:

This article was first published on The Quint. Read the original article here.

Related Stories

No stories found.
The News Minute
www.thenewsminute.com