Manjhi Team at IIM Ahmedabad - Confluence 2015
Friday, 7th August 2015: The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) hosted the team of 'Manjhi' - actors Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Radhika Apte and Director Ketan Mehta on its campus. The session kicked-off the 2015 edition of IIMA's International Management Symposium 'Confluence'. The talk was the first among the sessions of Director Series that will be hosted at IIMA with prominent names across the Indian movie industry in the coming months, lined up to the main fest from 27th to 29th November.
Manjhi is based on the life of Dashrath Manjhi, popularly known as the 'Mountain Man', who carved a path through a mountain using only a hammer and chisel for 22 years. The movie celebrates the unshakable conviction of a human being to toil against seemingly impossible odds and achieve success.
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The Manjhi team was received by a packed auditorium of IIMA students. The compère for the evening, comedian Daniel Fernandes of AIB fame, started off with a round of questions to Ketan, Nawazuddin and Radhika. Talking about his inspiration for taking up the film, Nawazuddin explained how he instantly connected with Manjhi's character and that one dialogue, "Bhagwan ke bharose mat baithiye. Kya pata bhagwan hamare bharose baitha ho?", made him recollect his entire life. He kept the audience entertained with snippets from the making of the film and by reciting his famous dialogues. Ketan Mehta spoke about a Director's dilemma in balancing the creative spirit with considerations of commercial viability. He acknowledged the role of increasingly mature audiences in India in stoking directors to deliver a wide range of cinema. Complimented for her role as Ahalya in Sujoy Ghosh's short Bengali film bearing the same name, Radhika exchanged her experiences while shooting Manjhi and working with Nawazuddin and Ketan. She is looking forward to work with Rajnikanth, opposite whom she will be starring in an upcoming film.
Once the floor was thrown open to the audience, the Manjhi team was at the receiving end of a barrage of invigorating questions. In response to a question, Nawazuddin confessed that, as an actor, enacting so many diverse characters was extremely draining. However, he was grateful that it gave him to opportunity to live so many different lives in the span of a single lifetime.
The Manjhi team felicitated a few success stories from the IIMA start-up ecosystem - Sridhar Rajagopalan - an educational entrepreneur who has helped change the way student learning outcomes are seen in India, Nirmal Kumar - founder of a new line of auto-rickshaw services called G-Auto in 2009, Prayaas - IIMA's initiative to enable children of neighbouring areas to get access to quality education, and the Right to Education Resource Centre - IIMA's initiative to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds utilize the benefits of Right to Education Act to its full extent.
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