Abhinay Deo has a film opening in one of the most jammed Fridays of the year, and he's leaning on favours to get noticed. The director of Delhi Belly and 24 told Bollywood Hungama that Bhushan Kumar agreed to put the Doosra trailer on T-Series' YouTube channel even though the label has no financial stake in the project. "He said, 'Arre, trailer chalao'," Deo recalled, calling it a huge break given the channel's subscriber count, which he put above 300 million.
Doosra traces Ganguly's cricketing arc up to India's 2002 NatWest Series final win over England, but Deo built a second, fictional track alongside it. Tara, played by Plabita Borthakur, is a girl from a conservative Jodhpur household whose life gets quietly rewired by watching Ganguly's career on television. Deo said the idea came from producer Masha Sajdeh's husband Rohan, a Chicago-based former club cricketer in Australia who'd faced racism there and saw his own story echoed in Ganguly's. Ad man Agnello Dias, brought in to shape the narrative, is the one who pushed for the parallel character to be a girl with no connection to cricket at all.
The film also thanks Subhash Ghai and actor Jisshu Sengupta in its opening credits. Deo said Ghai invited the team to screen the trailer at his Whistling Woods International festival after he liked it enough to want students to see it, while Sengupta, a co-star from Deo's web series Brown, is helping line up promotions in Kolkata, Ganguly's home city.
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