On the runway

Manika Ahuja 

Many noticed the conspicuous change in the title made at the last juncture. While some termed it unfortunate, the remaining few, well, proceeded to watch the recently released movie Running Shaadi blissfully, oblivious of all the hullabaloo. 

For the uninitiated, the change (read the-last minute decision to drop the .com) towards the end of the film’s title came as a consequence of popular online matrimonial portal shaadi.com, dragging the film’s makers to the court, contending that the film’s title bore an uncanny resemblance with the matrimonial site’s name. The result? Well, the Bombay High Court directed the film’s makers to drop the ‘top level domain name (read the .com) from the movie’s title owing to which, Runningshaadi.com lighted up the screens as Running Shaadi.

Needless to say, nobody can quite fathom the staggering amount of ‘distress’ that the director, Amit Roy, of the Taapsee Pannu, Amit Sadh and Arsh Bajwa-starrer found himself in! “It is very unfortunate. All of it left me very distressed. I mean, it is a film based on a website, and yet, we were forced to drop the .com.”

“How can someone allege that the film is ‘riding on their brand’ without even watching the film? Whipping up litigation just a week before a film is slated for a release is the last thing that one expects. In such a scenario, the filmmakers are left with no other option but to give in to the demands being made,” adds Roy, who was recently in city, along with the film’s leading actors in tow. 

Total nightmare 

So, Roy’s version of a nightmare translated to “reprinting the posters last minute, even when it was not the easiest thing to do, and having to ‘mutilate’ the film to cut out any mention of .com made in the movie.” 

Amit Sadh, who portrayed an urban Bihari, Ram Bharose, in the film, confesses to having experienced the nightmare jitters, “when I first said an instant ‘yes’ for the film.” Wondering what could have been the reason? Well, hear it from Sadh, “I loved the script, but then it struck me that the character that I was to play belonged to place where I have never been and spoke a language that I had never heard.”  

As for the central idea behind the character, Roy and Sadh inform in unison; ample care was taken to ensure that “in contrast to the fixed image of Biharis and the way they are caricatured in movies because of their way of speaking, we will not mock people from Bihar, by any means.”

True passion  

Interestingly, while the generalised trajectory of the acting bug to strike an artiste is the time when he or she first steps into the entertainment industry, for Sadh, the trajectory was ‘somewhat’ at variance. “The day I quit acting in television series was the day that my passion for acting awakened to a greater degree. I read a lot and learnt even more,” recalls Sadh, who started his innings on the small screen with the TV series Kyun Hota Hai Pyaar. 

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