Ragging should not be tolerated: Manish Gupta

Film-maker Manish Gupta has every reason to be a bundle of nerves, but he insists that he is far from it. His film deals with the issue of ragging in colleges and hostels and is releasing on the same day as an Aamir Khan-starrer is. “I’m not at all nervous. There’s no reason to be,” he says confidently.

Ask him what prompted him to make a film on such a subject and he says that he sought inspiration from an incident that occurred 17 years back. “I was studying engineering back then. I came across a few boys from another university and they were bragging about how a fellow batch-mate was molested every night by boys, against his wishes,” says Manish.

At first, he thought that the group was just bragging and concocting stories but when he learnt that the story was for real, it got his blood boiling.

“Till I heard this story, I didn’t know that this kind of ragging even existed,” says Manish adding that the Aman Kachroo case (where the boy was ragged to death) was the last straw and he decided to expose harsh realities through a film. The film, however, says Manish, is only partly inspired by Aman’s case.

“It is inspired by various such cases,” says Manish. When Aman’s father, Rajendra heard about Manish’s project, he decided to promote the cause through a movement he had started after his son’s death. But the lead actors of the film, Vatsal Sheth and Tulip Joshi don’t seem to know of either Aman or Rajendra’s movement.

Point his out to Manish and he defends his actors saying that Rajendra’s involvement came about only after the shooting was over. “And my actors were not really required to know about the backdrop for the film. I did a lot of research, which is why I know about almost all ragging related cases,” he smiles.