SynopsisForeword by Amitabh Bachchan
Afterword by Shoojit Sircar
‘Na’ sirf ek shabd nahi … apne aap mein pura vakya hai. Isey kisi tark, spashtikaran,explanation ya vyakhya ki jaroorat nahi hoti … ‘No’ ka matlab ‘no’ hota hai. Usey bolne wali ladki koi parichit ho, friend ho, girlfriend ho, koi sex worker ho ya aapki apni biwi hi kyu na ho. ‘No’ means ‘no’ and when someone says ‘no’, you stop …
Seldom has a contemporary film’s dialogues fired the general imagination the way Pink’s did. Seldom has a film challenged ‘Bollywood’s popular misogynistic tropes’ like Pink did.
Released in September 2016, the film began to trend immediately. Over the next few months, as it became a phenomenal box-office success, it also became the subject of social and cultural debates – on the rights of women, and the justice and penal system in India. Not only did it manage to capture the zeitgeist but also established itself as a yardstick by which future films making a socio-political statement would be judged. The film became a tool for organizations to sensitize people about crimes against women. For a Hindi film to be able to do that is unheard of.
Pink: The Inside Story looks at the making of the movie and tries to understand why it resonated with large sections of society. With inputs from its principal cast and crew, Gautam Chintamani tracks the journey of the film – from its inception to the writing of its numerous drafts that kept being shaped by real-life events and personal experiences of the people connected with it, to its toils to wangle a producer within ‘Bollywood’ as the big studios refused to come on board, and from its spot-on casting to the immediacy with which it endeared itself to its audience.
Including the much-feted screenplay of the film, this is a riveting account of how one of the most important films of our times came to be made.
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Binding: Paperback
About the author
Gautam Chintamani is the author of Dark Star: The Loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna (2014) and Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak: The Film That Revived Hindi Cinema (2016). His writing has featured in national publications, including a compilation on Dadasaheb Phalke Awardees published by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Legends of Indian Silver Screen. He was on the National Film Awards jury for Best Writing on Cinema in 2016.
Gautam is the great-grandson of literarian Sir C.Y. Chintamani and the grandchild of Telugu poet laureate Aurdra and noted feminist writer K. Ramalakshmi. He and his wife, Amrita, along with their dog, Buddy, live in Gurgaon and in the hills of Himachal.
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