Heartbreak: Christopher Nolan not coming to India, had no idea about IIT event

Brace for heartbreak, Christopher Nolan fans. Your Mumbai date with him, as of now, stands cancelled. In fact, if the director’s representative is to be believed, there was no date scheduled. At least, Nolan didn’t know anything about it.

A few days back, the Facebook page of IIT Mumbai, put up a post that sent the country into a tizzy. It was a poster with Nolan on it which also declared “IIT Bombay’s Mood Indigo Illuminati presents Christopher Nolan’. The poster also gave a date - 28 December.

Soon after, #NolanInIndia started trending on Twitter and apparently, that is when the director and his team got to know that they were scheduled to visit India.

A report on Hollywoodreporter.com states, “Christopher Nolan will be honored in December by the big annual cultural festival organized by the students of the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai.”

However, it adds, “A rep for Nolan says the director is unaware of the event and has no plans to attend.” The report also quoted the representative as saying, “The official spokesperson of Mood Indigo will be clarifying everything through a press release.”

Journalist Nikhil Taneja, also got in touch with Nolan’s representative, who told him that Nolan has no plans of visiting Mumbai anytime soon.

Following are the tweets Taneja put out.

#Nolan rep says "no plans to visit India this yr" & his appearance was "mistakenly announced" http://t.co/AlIeZ2NfB8 pic.twitter.com/CTH45OdG68

— Nikhil Taneja (@tanejamainhoon) October 29, 2014

Whatever the explanation and however it pans out, let's remember the IIT students are just kids. And shit happens.

— Nikhil Taneja (@tanejamainhoon) October 29, 2014

However, one must point out here that though the country, and its media, were carried away by the Facebook post and the trending hashtag on Twitter, none of the reports quoted any representative from the college as saying that Nolan would visit India.

The poster said ‘presents Christopher Nolan’, which was in turn, inferred as a confirmation of his physical presence in the festival. One might now say that they were only referring to the award they intended to present Nolan with and ma also screen some of his films, like in other college fests and film festival.

However, if Nolan was indeed not invited, when social media went berserk assuming he will be visiting India, at least the organisers of the festival should have clarified their stand. Something that Nolan’s representative had to do themselves.

Though IIT has not offered their version of the story yet, one can guess that this was just an instance of an advertising gimmick gone wrong.