It's a pathetic verdict: Joy Sengupta

Joy Sengupta, who has played the role of a safety officer in Martin Sheen, Mischa Barton and Kal Penn starrer Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, is stunned by the recent Bhopal gas tragedy verdict. Though the storyline of his film will not change following the recent verdict, the actor feels such a judgement will set a precedent to India's complete sell-out to corporate greed in the world.
Says the actor, 'It's a pathetic verdict.It's a complete sell-out to India's corporate muscle power. We are trading off people's lives because they are poor. This was just an open- and-shut case. The verdict would have been different if the sufferers were from the
middle or upper class. In our country, we don't have any regard for the poor. They were the so-called invisible people of India. The plant that was responsible for the leakage was running at a loss. Hence, it didn't upgrade itself and was constantly compromising on the security of its workers, who were primarily slum dwellers.'
However, the premise of Sengupta's film doesn't focus on the verdict. 'We've done a realistic research and haven't indulged in any blame game. We have looked at the incidents factually. It begins with the coming down of a French journalist (Mischa Barton) to cover some event and then, stumbling on this issue after she interacts with a local journalist (Kal Penn). In the film, I play a safety officer in the plant and my character is in charge of ensuring the safety of the workers. In real life, the safety officer of the plant still resides in Bhopal. While his real name is Mr Biswas, my character's name has been change to Mr Roy in our film. Though our film was supposed to release this year, shooting isn't over yet,' Sengupta signs off.