Espionage under arc lights

Bhattacharjee has just received the rights for the book,but he is eagerly waiting for the shooting to begin. “At present,only the first draft of the script is ready. Hopefully,we will begin pitching the script to the actors within a month. However,the shoots will be arduous because the plot demands that the movie have a lot of real-scene shots. We plan to be able to release the movie by August 2012,” he says. Deva says that he has always known that his books would one day be made into movies. “I never had any doubts that Lashkar would be made into a movie. Also the timing is absolutely perfect for this to go to the screen,in terms of how the war on terror is heading,” he says.

Lashkar joins a new club of books making it to Bollywood. Why don’t many Indian books find space on the silver screen? Bhattacharjee opines,“We have a bounty of literature here in India,but the space for pulp fiction is very small. However,in the recent past,this pattern has changed,and pulp fiction has claimed its own niche in the Indian market,which is why movies like 3 Idiots were made.” However,he feels that while this phenomenon is new to Bollywood,it has been around in India,as a whole. “The pulp fiction market has interested Bengali,Tamil and Telegu film-makers for at least a decade,” he concludes.