New Delhi: A quirky Bollywood film about the travails of an unusually virile, but broke sperm donor ‘Vicky Donor', has left the ribs of an otherwise moralistic mainstream Indian audience, tickling. The relatively low budget film directed by Shoojit Sircar, which has well known video jockey Ayushmann Khurrana, playing the sperm donor Vicky, and the beautiful Yami Gautam as his love interest Ashima, has not only grossed over $ 2.60 million in ticket bookings, but has also left sperm banks in India rubbing their hands in glee. “We can thank Vicky Donor for increasing the general awareness about sperm donation and even making it fashionable. Sperm banks report that since the film was released, there has been a rise in the number of calls being made by young men keen on donating their sperm,” Ritu Bhatia said in the India Today. Dr Bharati Dhorepatil, operates an infertility clinic in the central Indian city of Pune. According to Bharati ever since the movie, which sees the donor Vicky raking in the money for donating sperm hit the silver-screen, she has been receiving a flood of queries. “I think we started getting emails ever since the movie's trailer hit the screens.When films are made on such a subject, people accept it more easily,” she said. The film revolves around the three central characters Vicky, Ashima and Dr Baldev Chaddha, a fertility expert based in New Delhi, who can ‘assess' the quality of a sperm by merely looking at the donor's face. Like in most popular Bollywood stories, a love angle and a climax form integral part the film's discourse. “I had a lot of misconceptions about sperm donations. I went to see the film for fun, but came back with some education on fertility and sperm donation issues,” Isaac Costa, who saw the film Sunday night said. Produced by actor John Abraham, the film's director Sircar said that it was a “light-hearted look at the taboo attached to infertility and artificial insemination”. Abraham is more simplistic: “Basically, Vicky Donor is a romantic comedy between a Punjabi boy and a Bengali girl. But the concept is set against the background of sperm donation.”
