Ray of hope for KC Paul documentary

Kolkata: After getting no response from the local Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) office, the producer of Saumya Sengupta '

The Geocentric Man

' was finally informed on Friday that Prasoon Joshi has constituted a revising committee to review it in Mumbai on February 28. On the same day, director Suman Ghosh also got a U certificate for his Amartya Sen documentary titled 'The Argumentative Indian'.

Ghosh doesn’t wish to court any further controversy and is content saying that he is “happy” to have finally got the certificate. However, a CBFC source confirmed that even though the process was completed by mid-January, the certificate reached Ghosh only after he dialled Joshi.

Insiders said that regional officer Samrat Bandopadhyay had claimed the delay was due to a fault on the part of the censor agent – an allegation the latter strongly refuted. Though Bandopadhyay refused to entertain calls from TOI, the CBFC source said, “Ghosh incidentally knows Joshi. But what about those without this access? Advisory panel members are upset too.”

Amit Ganguly

, producer of “The Geocentric Man”, had been running from pillar to post to know the fate of his documentary on Kolkata’s self-proclaimed scientist

KC Paul

. “We had written an email to Joshi requesting his intervention. I had heard that the local office had rejected it for being ‘anti-scientific’. But the CBFC emails didn’t mention it. Even the regional officer refused to address my confusion,” Ganguly said.

On Friday, Ganguly received two calls from the local CBFC office. “The first caller had no clue about what I had to do. Bandopadhyay told me the details and asked me to speak to Joshi’s secretary. But surprisingly, he never told me that the certification was refused in Kolkata. It was Joshi’s secretary who kindly gave me this information. I wonder why Bandopadhyay kept me in the dark over something that was so easily clarified by the Mumbai office,” Ganguly said.