Love for Bengal drove me from NASA to Bollywood: Bedabrata Pain

Love for Bengal and a burning desire to present the forgotten story of a Bengali freedom fighter to people outside the state, drove senior NASA scientist Bedabrata Pain to land in Bollywood.

Pain, 49, said he decided to turn a filmmaker to tell the story of Masterda Surya Sen, who plotted and executed the famous Chittagong uprising against the British in the 1930s through a film.

Pain said he hardly found anyone outside West Bengal being aware of the courageous story of the raid of the British armouries by a handful of patriotic revolutionaries in Chittagong, now in Bangladesh, which shook the British colonialists.

"I spent 26 years outside Bengal and 15 years of which I worked as a senior research scientist at the NASA. But the Bengali in me would never go away. After I found in 2006 that not many people in India knew of the Chittagong uprising, I decided to make a film on it," Pain said.

Pain was one of the inventors of the active pixel sensor technology that produced the world's smallest camera. He was inducted into the US Space Technology Hall of Fame.

Pain says the film, 'Chittagong' which releases on October 12, was made in Hindi because he wanted a pan-India audience to see it.

"If Masterda Surya Sen were born in Europe, by now there would be a hundred films on him as it is a David vs Goliath story," the director felt.

Starring Manoj Bajpai and Nawazuddin Siddiqui, 'Chittagong' deals with a group of schoolboys and young women, led by Surya Sen, a teacher, who raided two armouries in the place. The recent success of Bengal based Hindi films like 'Kahaani' and 'Barfi', has left the debutante director elated.

"I hope mine will be a hit too as the country is now taking note of Bengali talents," he said.

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