When we played the trailer of Akshay Kumar’s PadMan in our office at 11 o’clock sharp this morning, the girls on our staff (far outnumbering the guys) leaped to their feet cheering loudly and gave the actor a rousing hand of applause at the end. All it took was 2.25 minutes for him to dramatically drive home the message that with the New Year will come new hope and new beginnings for the country that still sadly continues to live in the Dark Ages where it comes to dealing with women and their health issues.

That was my response, too, yesterday afternoon when Akshay shared the trailer with me at a private screening. I was also stunned because I cannot think of any actor in the world who would risk making a mainstream film on an otherwise taboo women’s subject like sanitary pads and menstrual hygiene. That too in Bollywood which is the country’s heartbeat for entertainment and the biggest producer of the world’s largest film industry. But Akshay is cut of a different cloth.

In Bollywood he is known as the Khiladi because of his lovably roguish action character in the series of films under that title. A Khiladi is also a player. And that Akshay undoubtedly is because it takes sportsman-like courage and persistence to keep making meaningful cinema with a social message like Toilet: Ek Prem Katha and PadMan when the rest of Bollywood is tickling the audiences’ fancy with films that are hard sell for action, romance, history and drama. No wonder Amitabh Bachchan starts off thePadMan trailer by declaring in his booming voice, “In America there is Superman, Batman and Spiderman, but in India there is PadMan!”

The ‘PadMan’ in this socially relevant Bollywood film directed by R. Balki is the Tamil entrepreneur and social activist Arunachalam Muruganatham who dramatically leaps out of the pages of author-producer Twinkle Khanna’s story ‘The Sanitary Man’ from her bestselling book The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad. That Akshay chose to make a commercial film on this chapter from his wife’s book speaks volumes for how strongly he believes the subject of menstruation must be urgently addressed in our narrow-minded and closed society.

Watch the trailer, please. We did again in the office. And this time the men, brought up on a diet of Akshay Kumar’s action films likeRowdy Rathore, the Khiladi series,Boss, Gabbar Is Back andBrothers, watched in silent amazement how the actor who is at ease on screen with sophisticated weapons and sci-fi gadgets boldly and enthusiastically handled an out of bounds commodity like a woman’s sanitary pad for this film. PadMan is releasing on January 26, 2018. Forget Superman, Batman and Spiderman… PadMan is here. And he is an Indian Superhero!

https://youtu.be/-K9ujx8vO_A