After three years of no-show, Anuja Chauhan's 2008 bestseller The Zoya Factor has fallen out of Shah Rukh Khan's hands and gone to rival producer Manmohan Shetty instead.
The novel a few young Delhi girl's almost-telepathic affinity to the Indian cricket team was grabbed by Shah Rukh's Red Chillies. Apparently, at that time of time the novel's heady mix of glamour and cricket had appealed to Khan. As a time flew by, the unconventional remained unused.
And now it has gone to producer Manmohan Shetty's Walkwater Films. Hopefully, Chauhan's novel would now be filmed instead of left to hibernate. However, when contacted Manmohan Shetty's daughter Pooja said they haven't yet decided what to do with the novel, or how you can film it.
Tragically Chauhan's other bestselling novel The Battle For Bittora appears to be suffering an identical fate. Its filming rights were acquired by Saregama nearly two years ago. However the movie project shows no signs of progress. When contacted Saregama's CEO Apurv Nagpal informed that the project would now be looked into.
When reminded that Saregama had the movie rights of The Battle For Bittora for less than three years Nagpal retorted, "We still have one and a half years."
Anuja Chauhan need to be holding her breath and praying that her two novels don't suffer the fate of Chetan Bhagat's two bestsellers 2 States and three Mistakes Of My Life. The filming rights of the 2 novels were bought by Sajid Nadiadwala and UTV, respectively. But no progress was made thereafter.
A tragic scenario in an industry that cannot stop moaning in regards to the paucity of excellent stories and scripts.
