Entrepreneur, motivational speaker, author and philanthropist, Jillian Haslam wants her story to reach cinemas. Her memoir published in 2011, Indian.English recounts the story of her family and the hardships they endured when her father, an officer in the British Indian army decided to stay on India post Independence.
“It’s not what happens to you, but what you do about it.” It’s these words by her parents that became Haslam’s mantra and led the now 49-year-old to turn her life around through sheer hard work and grit.
Incredible story
Her memoir talks about how the Haslam family went from living comfortably as the children of an army officer to seeking shelter under the stairs of a dilapidated building in the slums of Kolkata. Her father had decided to stay on in India after Independence and was unable to find sustained work to support his family. “I can’t be held responsible for my parents’ ancestry and my father’s decisions. I feel Indian because I grew up here, it’s all I know and it’s what I have grown to love. I even get asked about why I don’t feel bitter towards everyone except those who helped my family to survive. But I just don’t,” said Haslam over a phone interview from Kolkata with The Hindu.
Based in London now, Haslam makes frequent trips to Kolkata thanks to the charities she runs under the Remedia Network which have vocational training programmes for young women, the elderly and people with disabilities. After working in the banking industry for almost two decades in India and London, Haslam decided to quit her job at Royal Bank of Scotland in London to become a full-time motivational speaker, author and philanthropist. She claims to be a motivational speaker who doesn’t write any speeches, and instead draws on her life experiences to speak to the audience straight from her heart. “I just ask the organisers what message they want me to deliver to the audience. I can sit outside in a car for five minutes and get my thoughts together to get on stage and speak. That’s when I am at my best,” said Haslam.
Life lessons
Talking about her childhood and how it influenced her life, Haslam is firm in her belief that helping those in need are the lessons she has learned. “A family like ours shouldn’t have been able to survive in those places but we did because of the help from the poorest of the poor. The milkman, dhobi, paanwalla, the vegetable woman - they did so much for us! I don’t know how it’s possible for people to turn their backs on suffering. I could never live with myself if I did that,” she elaborated.
On her recent visit, filmmaker Jack Sholder and screenwriter Joshua Russell accompanied her for researching the upcoming film based on Haslam’s life. Her objective behind making the film is to let those who are struggling know that anything is possible with determination and resilience. Haslam is passionate about the project, “The book sold 2,50,000 copies and the story has touched people across the board be it the biggest banks, Ivy League schools or schools in slums in Kolkata. I just thought that if this can be turned into a movie then it would have the power to reach every single girl and boy in every corner of the Earth,” she says.
Keeping it real
As a director, Sholder is cautious about not sensationalising the poverty in the film and wants to tell Haslam’s story as authentically as possible. “That’s [slums in Kolkata] just the world in which the story takes place. [We’re] not trying to make it picturesque or exotic. It’s just a human story that could take place anywhere in the world and it just happens to be here,” said Sholder, whose previous work includes A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985) and The Hidden (1987). He adds how important it was to see the places which Haslam has described in her memoir. “It was very important to get a feel for the city. The city is a character in the film. It’s also to spend a lot of time around Jillian. We’d read her memoir but we found that it was only the tip of the iceberg. There was so much more that happened! A lot of the things she describes in the book have a lot more nuance, detail and depth than we imagined,” he elaborated. With previous writing and producing credits to his name like Fancypants (2011), OMG (2011) and Dog Jack (2010), it’s Russell’s first trip to India. “It [Kolkata] feels very frozen in time. You have a really nice brand new Audi in the street next to a hand-pulled rickshaw filled with heavy stuff. Also, in just the way that the traffic just flows together that Westerners cannot imagine but it works incredibly well! I was watching very carefully to see if anyone got ran over and nobody did. It was impressive. Telling the story truthfully also means including these environmental factors that affect it,” explained the writer.
Sharing his vision for the untitled biopic which is tentatively planned to release by mid-2020, Russell emphasised the uniqueness of the film, “One aspect that is very important which you don’t really get unless you include it, is the way the community played a vital role in sharing what little they have to make sure they take care of the others. That combined with Jillian’s discovery of her voice and power makes this story a cocktail that is empowering and heartbreaking at the same time.”