In Abhinay Deo’s account, Sourav Ganguly’s shirt-waving celebration at Lord’s in 2002 was not merely a sporting victory. It was a national moment that told young Indians something larger: if India could beat one of the strongest teams in the world on its home ground, then the barriers ahead of them were not fixed. That conviction, Deo says, is the emotional foundation of Doosra.
A cricketing image, a wider story
The director is careful about what the film is not. Doosra borrows the feeling of the 2002 moment but does not retell a cricketer’s story. Instead, it places a young woman’s fight against societal conventions at the centre. The choice is deliberate: Deo argues that staying with cricket would have reduced a larger theme to a small one.
“If it was a cricketer’s story or it just remained to be a cricket story, we would have done immense injustice to a subject matter which was much larger,” he told The Times of India.
That larger subject, in his description, is self-belief: the ability to stand up and recognise that “we are good enough.” The protagonist’s struggles, he says, have little to do with cricket, and that is the point.
Why the frame matters now
Shot several years ago, Doosra is finally reaching audiences. Deo describes it as timeless, arguing that its examination of prejudice will still read decades from now. The reasoning is simple: the film is not tied to the news cycle of the sport but to a recurring question of who is allowed to assert their freedom.
For Deo, the 2002 memory was also personal. His career began around the same period, and he recalls the aftermath as a small awakening: a sense that he was good enough to take the calls he later took in his filmmaking. That autobiographical layer makes the film’s release feel less like a delayed project and more like a long-held conviction finally being tested.
- The Lord’s celebration functions as an “I can do this too” moment rather than a plot point.
- A young woman carries the story, keeping the theme from becoming a cricket biography.
- The film’s relevance, Deo argues, lies in its treatment of prejudice, not in when it was shot.
A case for the unconventional
Deo extends that argument to the industry. Big-budget spectacles, franchises and star-led cinema have their place, but he says filmmakers have a responsibility to also back stories that take the form forward and open “new windows and new crevices” for audiences. He rejects the assumption that audiences only want familiar formulas; in his view, the industry decides what it offers, and the audience decides afterwards.
That position will resonate with readers who track how Hindi cinema balances franchise safety against new voices. Doosra arrives at a moment when that tension is once again visible: the film’s long wait and its non-cricket protagonist make it an unusual proposition, and precisely the kind of project Deo is asking the trade to protect. The test is whether viewers reward a film that asks them to bring a cricket memory and leave the cricket behind.
Source: The Times of India
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