Well the blog has veered towards a travellers personal experiences but I haven’t forgotten I cae here to research and write a screenplay. I’ve been plugging away at the screenplay and my ideas and thought I should probably put a few down here since that was the original idea of having a blog in the first place.
Characters:
Rajiv Malhotra is a billionaire who inherited an Indian steel empire and turned it into a trans-national concern with a focus on India’s ability to provide outsourcing services to the rest of the world. For him every moment of every day in every timezone is an opportunity to provide efficient services. His obsession with utilising every second of the day means he has never been able to sleep. This inability to sleep has also meant he is infertile and has not been able to produce an heir to his empire. His decision to have a ‘perfect son’ made for him through the use of genetic technologies is the inciting moment of the story. From that moment powers beyond his control come into play.
Sapna is his unexpected daughter, when his wife gives birth to twins, a girl and a boy, Rajiv finds he has a daughter who sleeps beautifully. That sleep is so powerful that as she approaches puberty Sapna’s fertility when she dreams brings organic objects back to life. Her bedhead grows branches and a perfect white flower. The spores in the carpet burst into life over night filling the air with floating tendrils, her clothes basket grows into a thicket of bamboo. This exhuberant fertility frightens Rajiv and he does everything within his power to have this excess of organic material removed from his sight.
Sapna is the emotional heart of the story. It is through her that her father is finally redeemed and it is her that the audience feels most strongly for. Her twin brother Imran is cast out of the Malhotra family home as he is born deformed with a head shaped like that of a cow. He grows up in a poor Shia part of Bombay, scorned and laughed at by other children for his deformities he is accepted into the illegal underworld that provides a living for many of Bombay’s residents. He is a fixer, he knows who can solve a problem. He is a trickster character, he tells stories and recites poems in tea houses through the city’s slums. He pops up wherever he is needed, travelling without bringing attention to himself. However, something is missing from his life and it is that negative space that he seeks to fillful by travelling to Delhi home of the father and sister he doesn’t know he has.
There are plenty of other characters (including one more core character) but that would be giving away too much of the story and I want you all to come and see the film. More detailed thoughts to be posted when I’m sitting in Singapore twiddling my thumbs.
Have a good flight, and see you in April