Another day, another legacy mined for parts. This time, the cultural vultures are circling Sourav Ganguly, the man who taught Indian cricket how to snarl. According to the latest industry whispers, Rajkummar Rao is set to step into the oversized shoes of "Dada" starting this March. It’s a move so calculated you can almost hear the Excel spreadsheet humming in the background.

We’ve reached a point where the Bollywood biopic isn’t an art form; it’s an extraction industry. Like fracking, but for nostalgia.

The choice of Rao is, on paper, a stroke of casting genius. He’s the industry’s human 3D printer. Give him a wig, a specific gait, and a slight regional lisp, and he’ll vanish into the role before the first craft service table is set up. He’s done the "method" thing to death. But there’s a specific kind of friction here that no amount of acting workshops can fully grease over.

Ganguly is a lefty. Rao is a righty.

In the world of high-stakes sports cinema, this is more than a minor inconvenience. It’s a logistical nightmare. You can’t just flip the film in post-production unless you want the logos on the jerseys to look like Cyrillic. That means Rao has to spend the next few months rewiring his brain, teaching his non-dominant hand to mimic the most iconic off-side drive in the history of the sport. It’s an expensive, grueling bit of physical theater that will likely be augmented by "digital assistance"—the industry’s favorite euphemism for fixing it in post because the lead actor can’t actually hit a cover drive to save his life.

The cost of this authenticity? Millions. Not just in training, but in the time-is-money vacuum of a March start date. Shooting in India during the transition from spring to the inevitable, soul-crushing heat of summer is a gamble. They’re racing against the sun and a production schedule that’s already bloated with the expectations of a billion fans who treat Ganguly with the kind of reverence usually reserved for minor deities.

Why now, though? Because the "IP" of a living legend is the only thing that still guarantees a weekend opening in a post-streaming world. The theatrical market is a graveyard of original ideas, but biopics are the zombies that keep on walking. They’re safe. They’re pre-sold. They come with built-in marketing because the subject usually has ten million followers on X who will argue about the accuracy of a sweater vest for three weeks straight.

It’s the ultimate safe-bet maneuver. The producers aren't selling a story; they’re selling a data point. They know exactly who will watch this. They know the demographics. They’ve probably A/B tested the specific shade of Kolkata sunset that will appear in the climax.

The "March?" in the headline is the most honest part of the whole circus. In this business, a start date is a prayer, not a promise. Between the logistics of recreating Lord’s Cricket Ground on a backlot in Mumbai and the inevitable "creative differences" that plague any project involving a subject who is still alive and very much in control of his brand, March feels optimistic. It feels like a placeholder.

But Rao will show up. He’ll do the work. He’ll lose or gain the necessary fifteen pounds. He’ll learn to sneer at an imaginary Steve Waugh. The tech will smooth over the rough edges, the color grading will make the 90s look like a golden-hued dream, and we’ll all pretend we haven't seen this exact movie twelve times before.

We don’t want new stories anymore. We just want the old ones rendered in higher resolution with a more recognizable face. We’ve traded the messiness of actual history for the polished, 4K-ready version of a life.

It makes you wonder if the real Sourav Ganguly—the guy who took his shirt off on the balcony at Lord’s just to prove a point—would even recognize the version of himself we’re about to pay fifty bucks to see. Probably not, but I’m sure he’ll tweet the trailer anyway.

Is it cinema, or is it just another software update for our collective memory?