Abhimanyu Dassani reacts to Nikamma's box office failure: '... there is no effort without error and shortcoming'

Joining the league of Bollywood’s not so well to do movies at the box office in recent months, is Abhimanyu Dassani’s recently released action entertainer Nikamma . The film which waited for long to release during the pandemic and finally despite heavy promotions failed to do well on the first two days of its opening weekend.

The movie has earned Rs. 1.15 crores in two days marking only the beginning of a disaster spiral like many other films that arrived before it. Apart from being panned widely by the critics, Nikamma has failed to entice the audience and now the film’s hero Abhimanyu Dassani has quoted U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt’s famous Sorbonne speech from 1910 while reacting to the film’s ultimate failure.

The actor in a series of tweets wrote, “#TruthFairy ‘It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.’ - Teddy Roosevelt”

The quote famously titled ‘Citizenship in a Republic’ is pointed at people who work hard, toil, show courage and tenacity in an difficult situation and not at those who sit on the side-lines and judge people.

By sharing the speech Abhimanyu has made clear that he is only interested in working hard even when his film has failed to receive the response he would have liked it to get.

Nikamma is a remake of the Telugu film, Middle Class Abbayi which released in 2017 and was a hit. The remake has been directed by actor Sabbir Khan and released after a delay of two years. The movie also stars Shilpa Shetty and Shirley Setia in key roles.