Asserting that Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga can change the way love stories are depicted, Anil Kapoor is thrilled that the film's screenplay is chosen for Oscars library
Mohar Basu (MID-DAY; February 9, 2019)

In the week since it has released, Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga has been widely appreciated for bringing a same-sex love story into the mainstream. In another well-deserved honour, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has requested for a copy of the screenplay of the Sonam K Ahuja and Anil Kapoor starrer to include in the Core Collection at The Margaret Herrick Library. Source materials - including scripts, production records and photographs - in the Core Collection are available for study for filmmakers, writers and students of cinema.

"The story was so powerful and its message, so important that we, as artistes, had to support it," smiles Kapoor, elated at the development. The drama sees Ahuja play a closeted homosexual struggling to come out to her father - essayed by Kapoor.

The senior actor adds that in triggering a much-needed conversation, the film goes beyond the myopic, commerce-driven approach to cinema. "When I did 1942: A Love Story (1994), people questioned why I was doing the movie. Back then too, I knew that films are for posterity. Ek Ladki is a film with long legs. Such movies have an impact that lasts longer than the money earned over a weekend."

The wisdom he accumulated over his 40-year-long run in the movies prompted him to greenlight the script, regardless of its box office outcome. "It will stay with people for the concept and the social change it triggered. I hadn't done anything like this before. I knew it will prove its merit."