Every sperrrm is sacred – an appreciation of Vicky Donor’s Dr Chaddha

Among the many little pleasures of the new film Vicky Donor is the casting of the veteran character actor Annu Kapoor as the single-minded Dr Chaddha, who runs an infertility clinic in Daryaganj. Through his long career, including sporadic appearances in mainstream cinema, Kapoor probably never expected to meet a script that would require him to roll his tongue around the word “sperm” dozens of times. But he does it with aplomb, saying the word with a hard “p” and a stress on the “r” (and emphasising Dr Chaddha’s middle-class Punjabi background in the process) and often accompanying it with an arm movement that mimics a sperm’s wiggly upstream journey. Executed differently, in a different sort of film, the gesture could have been a demonstration of bad taste; instead, it makes you warm to this sincere man who has mentally reduced all human beings to sperm types (“bada heartless sperrrm hai”).

The good doctor is simultaneously Gandhian in his anxiety about the preservation of a man’s vital fluids and Hitler-esque in his ideas about Aryan supremacy (though the implications of the latter trait aren’t explored – it exists mainly to create situational comedy, and Dr Chaddha is in a humanist in all ways that matter). Large sperm models with wide-eyed expressions decorate his office; a sperm-shaped dangler bumps about in the front of his car; he says lines like “Shakal dekhke aadmi ka sperrrm pehchaan sakta hoon”. That all this is done without ever turning him into a sleazeball or a voyeur is a tribute both to Kapoor’s performance and to the way the character is written (though I’d like very much to think a screenplay like this could have been done by a man, I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that it was by a “female sperrrm” – Juhi Chaturvedi).

Throughout, it is obvious that Chaddha is much more interested in sperms than in actual sex. (At times you almost wonder how sound his knowledge of biological processes is: in one hilarious scene, while talking about the demand for celebrities’ sperms, he refers to “Lady Gaga’s sperm”, seemingly unconcerned that she is unlikely to manufacture the little things.) His heart sinks when he learns that his most productive donor (the film’s protagonist Vicky, nicely played by Ayushmann Khurana) might be in a sexual relationship or – even worse – getting married. And there is nothing remotely frat-boyish about their conversations, no sign of a dirty old man engaging in “guy talk” with a randy Lajpat Nagar boy.

****

There might appear something surreal about a film where two middle-class Indian men have an upfront, “G-rated” conversation about sperm while eating chola-kulcha at a streetside stall. But I saw these scenes as a natural extension of the paradoxes that exist in Indian society when it comes to sex and procreation: the fact that even deeply conservative people – who wouldn’t dream of discussing “it” with their children – can become feverishly intrusive when the subject of a married couple starting a family arises. (More on that here.) Or the fact that what should be a personal decision might often hinge on the urgent need for an heir to pre-empt your brother taking over the family property. This film extends these absurdities to their logical conclusion. "Sperm aur egg nu meet karva do na!" an overzealous client tells Dr Chaddha in the same tone that a father might employ while arranging a "meeting" for his daughter with a suitable boy.

Among other things, Vicky Donor is a fantasy of aspiration in which a carefree young man might buy his grandmother a 40-inch LCD TV from the money he earns through legal but frowned-upon means. It is also, in a small but significant enough way, a “Delhi film”: when Vicky falls in love with an aloof Bengali beauty (culminating in a  sweet scene where Rabindrasangeet comes to Lajpat Nagar-4), we are reminded that though Lajpat Nagar and Chittaranjan Park are barely 15 minutes apart, they are different cultural galaxies within the mini-universe of south Delhi. (Of course, games of one-upmanship are played even within each of these pockets: as one Lajpat Nagar resident sniffily says of another, “Yeh toh C-block mentality hai.”)

When Vicky and his girlfriend Ashima decide to get married, the film becomes, for a while, a nod to national integration, and these scenes – well-intentioned as they are – are among its weakest. The caricaturing of vulgar but good-natured Punjabis and uptight, fish-and-high-culture-obsessed Bengalis is much too broad – especially given that both sets of family members are soon revealed to be more accommodating and sensible than the stereotyping suggests.

But by the end, the film has cast its net much wider than Punjabis and Bengalis. In a late scene where the little products of Vicky’s sperm-donating are gathered together with their families, we see that some of the kids are dark-complexioned while others have blonde hair; there are children from north-eastern and south Indian families. Peel away the skin and we’re the same underneath, goes a platitude about human equality, but Vicky Donor doesn’t miss an opportunity to remind us of what we all looked like months before skin and developed organs even came into the equation. Seen in this light, Dr Chaddha is one of the sages and visionaries of our time. Monty Python’s “Every Sperm is Sacred” could well be the soundtrack of his life, though he wouldn’t think of the song as a satire.