At 7.45 am, three boys, uniform-clad and with sagging backpacks, rushed into a mall. They weren’t familiar with the layout so they ran up to a stiff-backed security guard. “Which way to the movie theatre?” one of them asked. The man pointed towards the escalator. “Quickly,” hissed another boy. “The show starts soon!”

Who’d have thought that three boys would bunk school to watch a movie about a man who made sanitary napkins? That, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of Bollywood.

Akshay Kumar is not the finest actor of his generation and neither is he the most handsome. Over the past 27 years, he has frequently assaulted our good sense and aesthetics with awful films and worse acting performances. However, for doing Padman and consequently bringing mainstream movie audiences face to face with sanitary napkins, Kumar and his wife Twinkle Khanna (one of the producers of Padman) deserve a standing ovation.

Laxmikant Chauhan (Kumar) lives in picturesque Maheshwar, in Madhya Pradesh. As he chirpily helloos his way past neighbours on his bicycle, it seems he has a perfect life. A loving mother, adoring sisters, a pretty wife who seems as besotted about him as he is with her — everything is in place. Then disaster strikes. Gayatri (Radhika Apte) gets her period, which means custom demands she spend the next few days outside the main house. Gayatri doesn’t mind this. She’s used to it, but Laxmikant hates this exile. When he discovers she uses a rag that he wouldn’t use as a duster to soak up her menstrual blood, he’s horrified.

And so begins Laxmikant’s quest to create a cheap sanitary napkin. Along the way, he must suffer insults, rejection and general misery. Still he persists, unswayed by repeated pleas from the women in his life to leave them and their menstruation woes alone.

Largely faithful to the real-life story of Arunachalam Muruganantham, Padman takes the liberty of setting the story in north India rather than south India. It’s ironic that while the trials faced by women and the stigma of uncleanliness during menstruation unite the country, regional divides remain insurmountable. At least as far as Bollywood is concerned, to secure the attention of its ‘pan-Indian’ audience, the hero has to be north Indian.

Written and directed by R Balki, Padman has the blend of gentle humour and earnestness that is characteristic of the adman’s films. A ruthless editor would have helped because the film feels slow and repetitive at points. It also rushes through more interesting dynamics, like the one between Laxmi and the little boy who introduces Laxmi to the Internet. However, Balki knows how to tug at heartstrings and at regular intervals, he shifts to fifth gear of emo-ness, thus distracting you from how long you’ve been sitting in the same seat and dear god it isn’t even interval… . For instance, if you’re not sniffling when Laxmi gives his talk at the United Nations, then you have a hormonal imbalance that’s far more worrying than PMS (pre-menstrual syndrome).

One of the most heartening parts of the film also ends up to be its weakest link: the relationship between Laxmi and Pari (Sonam Kapoor, wearing ensembles for which this writer would cheerfully sell her uterus, kidneys and liver). Pari is a management student and tabla player, and the first person to realise Laxmi’s genius. Just when you want to give thanks to the powers for Bollywood finally discovering men and women can be good friends without lust as a subtext, Padman squelches that hope. This is a shame because Kapoor and Kumar are perfectly credible as partners and an un-chemical disaster of a romance, even if they only have to pretend at the latter for about 30-odd seconds.

That blip aside, Padman is a little film with a big heart. In many ways, it’s a throwback to classic Bollywood, in which the good guy is the yokel who baffles city slickers and eventually comes out on top because of his goodness. He is rooted in rural India, ambitious, idealistic, and he mangles English with postcolonial charm and confidence. Kumar delivers a performance that’s awkward in parts, but not excessively over-the-top. Apte is wasted as the one-note Gayatri.

If there was ever a film that deserved to be made tax-free, Padman is it. Few Bollywood films admit their socio-cultural influence and wield it responsibly. Padman is one of them. It’s got all the masala melodrama that you’d expect of the genre, but it also urges audiences to rethink what they’ve taken for granted as far as being manly and the strength of women are concerned. Padman should be taken to schools (particularly those that are only for boys) and made mandatory viewing. As Laxmi says at one point in the film, if you can reach those who are too young to be brainwashed, then you stand a better chance of changing mindsets.

There’s a lot of joy and laughter in Padman, but also a bitter truth — women who have drunk patriarchy’s kool-aid are the biggest obstacle to women’s development. To see women begging Laxmi to stay out of their ‘business’ and staunchly wanting what is unhealthy and even dangerous is frustrating. Perhaps it will help if Padman is made accessible to wider audiences and maybe seeing women like Gayatri will make others realise they must demand more care and respect for their bodies. Parallely, Padman offers an example of how one can be an ally, which is well worth knowing today, when so many of us are trying to figure out how to support victims when faced with social injustices. Take a leaf, or a pad, out of Muruganantham’s life.

Meanwhile, if someone could turn their attention to menstrual cramps the way Muruganantham did to sanitary napkins, that would be bloody wonderful.