ICA department’s heartening move : original story and screen-play writer Biplab Goswami felicitated for winning prestigious IIFA award

By Our Correspondent

Agartala, March 14, 2025

Two long-veiled and facially unidentifiable married ladies had been seated in the corner of an ordinary and congested train bogey, ignored by fellow passengers but this normal event formed the basis of a chain of dramatic events when the husband of one lady got down from the train with her fellow and equally veiled lady passenger-not his actual wife. The drama unfolded rapidly with the sequence of events overlapping each other in quick succession till a breathless end.

This was the scaffolding of the original story penned by Tripura’s story writer Biplab Goswami and it was filmed by Bollywood superstar Amir Khan under the title of ‘Lapata Ladies’ in 2024, exposing the deep superstitions and faultlines in rural Indian societies in UP and Bihar. The film created quite a sensation among film buffs across the world. Amir Khan had produced the film that was directed by Kiran Rao but it did not gain much popularity in the auditoriums . But it was only after the film had been released on the popular OTT platform that it achieved an instant hit and created a sensation. The ‘Lapata Ladies’ had been India’s entry into the celebrated Oscar awards for films also but it failed to make the final cut.

But Tripura’s Biplab Goswami’s refreshingly original storyline and sleek direction of Amir Khan and Kiran Rao duo have recently ensured as many as ten awards for the film conferred by the International India Film Academy (IIFA). Among the ten awardees stands Tripura’s Biplab Goswami shiningly as the winner as the best original story writer. In fact the ‘Lapata Ladies’ has made such an impression in the intellectual circles that the chief justice of the supreme court Sanjib Khanna arranged a special viewing programme in the apex court’s conference hall for fellow judges as part of an awareness programme of the social evils still afflicting Indian rural hinterland.

In a heartening move the ICA department of the state headed by dynamic director Bimbisar Bhattacharjee this evening arranged a special felicitation programme for story and screen-play writer of the famous film Biplab Goswami in the government run ‘Nazrul Kalakshetra Auditorium’. The chief minister Dr Manik Saha attended the programme as chief guest and showered praises on story writer Biplab Goswami , describing him as an idol and ‘pride of Tripura’. It was an eminently successful and heart-warming programme.

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