When Unni Mukundan calls Jai Ganesh ‘a gem’, his best film yet,he does not say it lightly. “You don’t normally get films that change you as an individual. This film transformed me personally and professionally,” says the actor over the phone. Jai Ganesh, directed by Ranjith Sankar hit theatres today.
Essaying the wheelchair-bound hero Ganesh Gangadharan opened Unni’s eyes to the lives the disabled lead in “cities engineered for the abled. Somehow, we don’t ‘see’ the disabled people among us. This is not a random film. It changed me as a man.” The thriller gave him a new perspective on life. “Those of us who are not dealing with these physical challenges complain about the slightest thing that does not go our way. And then we have disabled people fighting for the basics.”
He did not want to showcase a ‘crippled hero’ for the sake of it and Ranjith Sankar assured him it would not be so. “The representation would be such that it would give the audience, especially the disabled, goosebumps. For me it was a role, but think of it from the perspective of, the reality of someone who has to spend his entire life in a wheelchair.” Ganesh is a hero, a man with agency over his narrative who does not seek sympathy. “And don’t we all like heroes? This film is not intended to garner sympathy but to show that they are also heroes.”
