Ever since veteran actor Amol Palekar donned the director’s mantle he has shown a penchant for exploring the feminine sensibility. But the protagonist of his next film Kal Ka Aadmi is a man.
Palekar believes our society owes to a man named Raghunath Karve, the mathematician who tried his best to usher some radical social changes concerning women’s status and birth control as early as 1921, the times when the psyche of the majority of Indians was least receptive towards such ideas. Karve set up his first birth control clinic contemporarily to Marie Stopes in London. Everyone knows Stopes, but no one knows Karve.
Palekar describes Karve as “the man of yesteryears who is also the man of tomorrow”—thus the film’s title. The film takes an objective look at Karve’s life, his opening the clinic, propagating the gender equality and even running a magazine focusing on sex education.
To bring Karve’s valuable contribution to the fore is the primary objective why Amol has made this movie.
Amol was the one who in his yesteryears brought the Hindi film hero down from the pedestal of a ‘larger-than-life’ character to a commoner with his realistic style. Yet acting wasn’t his ultimate dream. “My dream was to be a filmmaker. I used acting as an apprenticeship period to the craft from the best directors in the country”, says the genius director.
Ever since veteran actor Amol Palekar donned the director’s mantle he has shown a penchant for exploring the feminine sensibility. But the protagonist of his next film Kal Ka Aadmi is a man.