IIM Calcutta welcomes 'Manjhi' director, cast to their campus

 

Since this was an opportunity to also interact with management students at IIM Calcutta, they came down to campus and there was a session on the theme “Do It Yourself” in line with the central idea of the movie.

A cheer filled auditorium welcomed the team, with the session being hosted by Daniel Fernandes, one of India’s leading English Comedians. The discussion panel also included, Professor Vidyanand Jha to give the talk for ‘perspective of the students’.

Manjhi is a movie about a man who broke a mountain alone, for 22 years to build a road to the village where he lived, after his wife died by falling off from the very mountain. After a quick round of Q&A with the team, where they talked about all of this and the making of the movie, the decisions about casting Radhika and Nawazuddin in the roles and the inspiration behind the movie, the panel was open to questions.

An interesting parallel from the movie was drawn by Prof. Jha, where he said, “We see an increasing trend, although increasing slowly, among students today – both in the institute and in India generally speaking, to go out there start something on their own. The kind of perseverance needed to pursue entrepreneurship is no less than breaking a mountain.”

For management students, this was a chance to get an insight coming from a completely different industry than they are usually exposed to. “Our heroes are not just those whom we hear about often in the news, rather they are people who are slowly changing the society in the hinterlands of the country,” said Ketan Mehta while talking about the purpose of the movie.

On being asked about Nawazuddin’s long struggle in the film industry he quoted the movie, “You can follow your passion for as long as Manjhi did, or I did, if you follow just one goal in your life and rid yourself of everything else.”

In conclusion, in the spirit of the theme of the event – “Do It Yourself” – 3 entrepreneurs were awarded a trophy with the ‘Manjhi Hammer’ for their ideas and persistence. The award winning ideas were Abhishek Biswas for Ultra-safe Ultrasound, a patent-protected technology currently being developed at the Cambridge imaging lab; Aditya Pangtey for Indiebazaar.com a tech start up designed to help independent artists and designers sell their products online easily and Nitesh Prajapat for Appeti.com, an online marketplace that connects connoisseurs of food with purveyors of delicious Indian cuisine.