For a documentary putting the spotlight on an individual, half the battle for eyeballs is won if the person and his/her passions, aspirations and achievements are persuasive enough.
Amit Virmani’s Menstrual Man , about Arunachalam Murganantham’s fascinating journey into producing affordable sanitary napkins for the poor, may lack stylistic flourishes and narrative ingenuity but is absorbing for the intriguing man that Muruganantham himself is.
I decided to revisit Virmani’s 2013 film, what with R. Balki’s Akshay Kumar-starrer Padman, inspired from Muruganantham’s life, ready for Republic Day release and Abhishek Saxena’s overly pious and plodding Phullu , with Sharib Hashmi in the lead, released last June.
The very first scene in Menstrual Man is telling: a male teacher talking to young students about benefits of pads as against cloth with the girls giggling away, head bent down, eyes avoiding the intrusive camera in embarrassment. The notion of shame is further undercut by Muruganantham himself in the following scene.
“You would wonder if I have lived four years in Philadelphia, five years in California; I have not,” he addresses a gathering. Without a trace of mortification he admits to being a Class IX dropout who had to give up studies because of his father’s death and do odd jobs before finding his calling. He candidly admits that his English is self-taught, “designed” by himself. His forthrightness is not just disarming; it’s the kind of openness and candour that one wishes for around the talk of menstruation as well.
‘Scrap of the pyramid’
Much as the film is about women’s right to hygiene, it is also about Muruganantham’s self-motivated empowerment; starting from the “scrap (bottom) of the pyramid” to understanding the import of phrases and words like economic pyramid, BPL, bailouts, Occupy Wall Street to setting up a huge enterprise for upliftment at the grassroots than any self aggrandisement.
On the one hand is the social activism — how he revolutionised the concept of menstrual hygiene in rural India where women would normally take recourse to dirty rags, husk, sand and even ash, leading to severe, life-threatening infections. The simple, easily assembled and easier to operate machines and production units for sanitary napkins have also given them sustainable means of employment.
On the flip side, there is Muruganantham’s own idiosyncratic personality and self deprecatory humour that underlines every conversation and narration of how he went about creating a revolution. It started with seeing his wife Shanti use cloth during her period. If she were to buy sanitary napkins, the family’s milk budget would need to be drastically cut, she told him. He started making napkins for her and his sisters with cotton but they didn’t seem to be of good use and the ladies were not willing to be volunteers for his research for long.
Experiments work
When medical volunteers also couldn’t give him reliable data and feedback, he decided to go in for a weird research methodology — involving artificial uterus, football for a bladder, animal blood and even wearing the pad himself.
“I would keep checking for stains on my pants. I had become a woman myself,” he says. It made his wife and mother think of him as a pervert. Familial and social ostracism followed. Virmani highlights these dramatic moments in Muruganantham’s life with a quirky touch — using melodramatic clips from Bollywood films.
However, between the many laughs, the essential cause of India’s first man to have worn a sanitary napkin, is never forgotten: not to scale up but scale deep to reach out to the remotest corners of India. Muruganantham shows the way to successful social entrepreneurship: the Butterfly model (in which the butterfly sucks the nectar from the flower without harming it) as opposed to the Parasite model of profiteering (like mosquitoes sucking the blood of humans).
For him, success is all about building a sustainable livelihood activity for the community than buying an Audi; learning for him is all about impacting society and improving lives.
Menstrual Man ends with Muruganantham talking of setting up 643 machines in 23 States. You can see him getting ambitious — about taking his sanitary pad revolution to other underdeveloped countries, to generate jobs for 10 million women globally than one million in India alone. The cause continues to remain bigger than and ahead of his own self.
Hope the cause stays bigger than commerce in the mainstream Hindi cinema supporting it too.
