Chandrachur Singh : "I'm Disappointed that 'DAAG-THE FIRE' Was Not Nominated For An Oscar"

Now that the Oscars are FINALLY OVER I won’t have to hear the words ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ till the next time someone decides to do a film about a boy who encounters situations in his life that lead him to become a millionaire by answering questions on a game show hosted by Anil Kapoor.Oh yeah there’s a love story or whatever but being a legendary investor I was interested in the ‘millionaire’ part of the film.

But thanks to this exclusive article from The Jhunjhunwala Times, I have to listen to it all over AGAIN.

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By a Staff Reporter,

The Jhunjhunwala Times,

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Chandrachur Singh – the man best known for having both his eyes occupying two different places in his eyeball sockets had this very interesting statement to make about the Oscar winning film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’; “It’s amazing I tell you, an Indian film produced by an Englishman winning an Oscar is amazing.”

“It shows how open and accommodating the American society has become. There were days when they used to run away from young boys shitting in public. Today they watch in admiration as young Indian boys empty their bowels.”

Though he added quite despairingly “See back when I was the #1 star in Bollywood, movies then were unfortunately not viewed in the same light.”

“Many of my superhit films were way too controversial and ahead of their times. That’s why they were never nominated for the Oscar otherwise India would have won the Oscar years ago.”

He added quite profoundly “For example in the case of ‘DAAG – THE FIRE’, a film that I acted in was such a profoundly insightful film that many Americans had to call scientists from NASA to understand what exactly was going on.”

“It was revolutionary in every sense of the word when we added a sub- textual note in ‘THE FIRE’. We could have simply left the film as ‘DAAG’ but we added the term ‘THE FIRE’. Many people criticized us for adding the term. The MNS, Shiv Sena and the Ram Sena burnt posters of our film. The Indian government was scared of sending the film to the Oscars fearing a backlash.”

“But today everyone adds subtexts to their titles. We started that”

“The Oscar awards academy in fact wrote an official letter to the Indian government requesting them not to send ‘DAAG-THE FIRE’ because of the negative impact it might have on youngsters. A study conducted then showed that eight out of every ten kids would in all probability actually think that the word ‘DAAG’ meant fire even though DAAG actually means stain.”

“See when that happened the detergent companies actually pressured the US academy to pressure the Indian government so that ‘DAAG-THE FIRE’ would not get nominated. Surf and Tide were really scared that people would burn the DAAG’s on their clothes with fire and not remove the DAAG with detergent.”

Hinting at how his own performance in the film never came to garner an academy award because of the controversy surrounding the film Chandrachur had this to say “My performance in DAAG is one of the greatest performances of all time. I had to perform despite the sheer shrill tone of Mahima Chowdhary’s voice and the distractions of Sanjay Dutt.”

He continued “It’s a monumental effort for me to even look at the camera because my eyes focus in different directions and that gives me a headache. However Slumdog’s win has more than made up for all of that.”

Finally he added quite sadly “I am still disappointed that the academy did not consider DAAG-THE FIRE for the Oscar.”