A conversation space at the intersection of cinema and culture. Rooted in Hyderabad. Hosted by Darshim Saxena, FTII Screenwriting and Miranda House.
Darshim Saxena writes on cinema and culture, looking beyond what a film says to ask why it says it, who it serves, and what it leaves unseen. Her work appears regularly in Millennium Post, Free Press Journal, Deccan Herald and Orissa Post.
Episodes
Episode 04
A Working Position — Raja Bundela
The character actor’s Lakshman Rekha, and the room he changed from its edge. A conversation in three parts with NSD alumnus, director, and Bundelkhand statehood campaigner Raja Bundela, recorded in Hyderabad.
Watch Part 1 on YouTube
Watch Part 2 on YouTube
Watch Part 3 on YouTube
Watch Part 4 on YouTube
There is a moment early in our conversation where Raja Bundela does my job for me.
We are talking about the fight for Bundelkhand statehood, a fight he has carried for three decades, and he is explaining why he refuses to burn buses or stop trains the way older movements once did. He says the people he is fighting for are not the hero of this story. The government is the hero. He is the character artist working underneath, the one who must criticise the lead without ever upstaging him, who has to find the small seam where his point lands and nobody is humiliated. And then he looks at the empty recliner beside him and says the thing I had been circling for an hour without naming.
हम सेकंड सीट पर बैठे हैं। आप फर्स्ट सीट पर नहीं हैं। फर्स्ट सीट हम खाली रख रहे हैं कि भगवान आ गए तो तुम बैठ जाओ और हमारा काम कर दो।
Raja Bundela, on the second seat
He had no way of knowing he was describing the show. He had not been briefed on the name’s philosophy. He arrived expecting, in his words, a normal talk, a place to say his piece and move on. What he gave instead was the cleanest articulation of the second seat I have heard from a guest, and he gave it about his own life, which is the only place it has ever really lived.
This essay is about a man who chose the chair beside the hero and built a region’s cultural life, a marriage, three festivals and a forty year career out of that one decision. The host who introduced him called him a living archive. I want to complicate that, gently. An archive is finished. Raja Bundela is not finished. He told me his journey is still running, that he has not reached the stop where a person sits back and decides he has arrived. A living archive that argues with you, that is still fighting its own state into existence, is not an archive. It is a working theory of how to be useful without being the centre. So let me try to write it as a theory, because that is what he handed me.
01 · The slur, and the school that fixed his back
He is from Lalitpur, the part of Bundelkhand that the maps assign to Uttar Pradesh, born into one of the Thakur houses of the district. He told me a small thing about that house that turns out to be the whole engine. In the world he grew up in, the man who danced and sang for the raja was called the nachaiya, and the word was an insult. A boy who wanted the stage had already gone wrong.
मौड़ा बिगड़ गया।
The verdict on the boy who wanted the stage
So the first audience he ever lost was at home. He left. Gwalior first, a little study, the sense that Gwalior was not the city either. Then Delhi. In the gap between the two towns came a Naxal phase, the young man’s certainty that the whole country could be turned over by force of feeling. He is honest about where it left him. You change nothing, he said. The storm stays inside you and you fight it out within your own ribs. Police cases came, and then the certainty broke. I want to stop on this, because it is the first time he refuses the loud lever and keeps the fight inside himself instead, and he never once takes it back up. The man who would not burn a bus for Bundelkhand thirty years later, who would not run the gutter film at his own festival, who would not act one inch over the hero’s head in a frame, is already here in the boy who tried the storm, learned it changed nothing, and set it down. A friend told him about the National School of Drama, and the door he had been refused at home opened in a classroom.
He passed out of NSD in 1977.<Ref n={1} /> He and Raghuvir Yadav, two Hindi belt boys with no English, ran what he calls an andolan against the English language and then had to do the work in it anyway. I like that he keeps the andolan and the surrender in the same breath. He did not pretend he arrived ready. He arrived furious and underprepared and stayed.
What he absorbed at NSD was less a style than a spine, and the spine has a name. Ebrahim Alkazi ran the school until the year Bundela left it.<Ref n={2} /> Bundela tells the Alkazi stories the way everyone who passed through that building tells them, as scripture. The one about the play that began at seven and the Prime Minister who arrived late and was made to wait outside the dark until the first scene change. The one about the new teachers being handed books and sent away for six months to read before they were allowed to teach. He gets a detail or two wrong, which I will come back to in the notes, but the doctrine he took from it is exact and he has never put it down. Time is a moral fact. What you say is your responsibility and nobody else’s. When the other actor forgets his line, you keep going. We will need all three of these later, because he spends the rest of his life applying them off the stage.
02 · The golden rule
I asked him about the supporting roles. Most of his screen life was spent in them, the friend, the brother, the man one step to the side of the star, and I wanted to know whether he resented the position or read it as craft.
His answer was a complete grammar, delivered as if it were obvious.
The first rule of the character actor, he said, is that you never act better than the hero, however bad the hero is. You stand inside a Lakshman Rekha and you do not cross it. He named the line he descends from, the actors who lived their whole lives inside that rule and made it look like the lead role anyway. Balraj Sahni. Motilal. Then Gurudutt. Then Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, the men who were always character and never star. The Jeetendras and the Rajendra Kumars, he said flatly, were never actors at all. He is unfair there, and the unfairness is the engine of his whole rulebook. For him a star and an actor were incompatible trades, and the men who tried to split the difference belonged to neither. There is a producer waiting at the edge of every scene, he said, ready to decide that the side man is getting clever, that he is going over the hero’s head, and to have him cut. So you cannot underplay yourself into invisibility either, or you will simply not be noticed. The work is to find the few moments where you come alive without breaking the rule that keeps you in your place.
जीवंत दिखें।
The rule of the character actor
This is not a sad description. He does not offer it as a complaint, and I refuse to receive it as one. It is a discipline with its own difficulty, harder in some ways than carrying a film, because the constraints are external and unfair and the artist has to make beauty inside them anyway. He worked out, somewhere around Shola Aur Shabnam, that the men he shared the screen with were growing into stars while he stayed exactly where he was placed, and that the cage was not going to open for him. That is the moment most actors get bitter. He did something else. He decided that if the cage would not open, he would build a different building, where the subject was his, the finance was his, the release was his, the character was his. He went from the rule to the exception by leaving the system that needed the rule.
He directed Pratha, the film about a village girl installed as a living goddess so the men around her could use her under cover of her own sanctity, with Irrfan Khan in it years before Irrfan was Irrfan, playing the sadhu, and in making it he set himself against the religious power of his own Thakur belt.<Ref n={3} /> He directed and produced Kisne Bharmaya Mere Lakhan Ko, about the joint family coming apart and everything that was lost when it did. He had starred in Brij Bhoomi years earlier, his first film, rooted in the Braj country.<Ref n={4} /> He shot a fifty episode serial for Zee across the same Jhansi and Lalitpur belt. He made two films with an American house, work that took him into the independent circuit there.<Ref n={5} /> When he says he became a director, he does not mean he changed jobs. He means he stopped asking permission to be the centre of his own frame.
And then, having earned the first seat, he gave it up.
03 · The movement is a character role
This is the part of the conversation where the theory stops being about cinema.
On the first of November 1956, the year India redrew itself, Bundelkhand was cut in two and parcelled into Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh without, in his telling, anyone asking the land it was done to.<Ref n={6} /> He recites the wound the way people from a place recite it, as inventory. Seven rivers and still the region is called drought struck. The best wheat, the best peas, the lemons, all of it grown there and sent out. Four power stations and the current goes to light Agra and Kanpur and Noida and the Taj Mahal while children study under the lamp post. He calls it manmade poverty, a hunger manufactured and then blamed on the soil. Four different parties have governed the region across the years and each one claims to have done everything for it, which leaves him with one clean question. If you all did so much, why is it hell. Bring a white paper to the assembly. Let us see who did what, and for whom.
He has been pressing that question since, by his account, the fifteenth of December 1995. The record fills in the rest. He took over the Bundelkhand Mukti Morcha from Shanker Lal Mehrotra, the elder who first called him back to the soil and reminded him he owed it a debt. He stood for the Lok Sabha from Jhansi in 2004 and lost. He moved through the Congress, then his own Bundelkhand outfit, then the BJP, and now sits on the Bundelkhand Vikas Board.<Ref n={7} /> Thirty years, four parties, no state.
Here is what makes him a different kind of subject than a politician. He does not narrate the movement as a politician. He narrates it as a character actor, with the same rulebook he gave me for the screen.
You are fighting for people, he said, but you cannot wound them. Their children cannot go to jail for you. Their families cannot take the financial or social hit, because then they will not stand with you and they will not let their children stand with you either. And the government you are demanding from is, in the end, the one that will grant the state, so you cannot make the government the villain. You criticise it, you fight it, you list its failures, and you do all of it while telling it you are mai-baap, you are the parent, if you do not do this then who will. Both sides have to be heard and neither side can be turned into the enemy. He compared it directly to the spot a character artist has to find in a scene, the small space where his point gets made and nobody in the frame is destroyed.
He is sharp about why the old grammar is gone. Burn a bus today, stop a train, set fire to a government office, and the bulldozer comes to the house, and the words upadravi and terrorist and gangster attach themselves to you. He gestures at where we are sitting. So many died for Telangana, he said, in this very land, and that era is finished. The era now is this, two people talking, a thousand more watching later. The fight has become a war of ideas, and the character artist’s job in a war of ideas is to hold the seam.
If this were a hero’s fight, he told me, he would have gone to Delhi and made Bundelkhand a state already, killed the villain in the last reel and handed out the happiness. It is not that fight. The hero does that. He cannot. He is in the second seat, and he keeps the first one empty.
That is the line that lets the whole episode cohere. The empty first seat is not modesty and it is not defeat. It is a working position. From the second seat you can fight without becoming the thing you are fighting, and you can lose for thirty years without it curdling into the kind of bitterness that makes a man burn the bus.
04 · Going home, at a loss
He makes a brain drain argument that explains the return. If we keep exporting our talent, he said, the towns empty out. Everyone wants the city, whose capacity is fifty or sixty lakh while three crore arrive, so both systems break, the one you crowd and the home you abandon to the crows. He wants the film schools to carry a rule the way medicine does, a few compulsory years served in your own region, because a doctor does not open his dispensary only in the city when the sick are in the village. The roots, he kept saying.
So he took his own career home, and he is precise about the cost. He made three Bundelkhandi films on hard subjects, one against the practices of his own Thakur society, and he says he was buried for it. His house went. The market value of a film made in that soil, in that language, on that subject, is not the value of the thought you poured into it. He does not say this to be pitied. He says it the way a man states a price he agreed to pay.
There is a harder part of that story he did not tell me, and the record keeps it. Before the Bhopal screening of Pratha the warnings had already reached him out of Jhansi and Lalitpur and Gwalior, the towns the film was made from. At the screening he was attacked. Then came the cut that went deeper than the blows, the claim that he had arranged his own beating for publicity, which he has always rejected. A man can survive a bad release and even a bruised body. The accusation that the wound was a performance is the one that buries a film, and it buried this one. He had told the truth about the religious power of his own people, he was punished for it twice, once with the hands and once with the rumour, and he went back and kept making films on that soil anyway.
The story he does tell about that release is the truest thing in the conversation about what going home really means. It opened at the biggest theatre in Jhansi, a friend’s hall. They were having tea at half past five, the show was at six, and the manager called in a panic. The people had broken the doors. Bundela ji’s film, ours, made on our land, why would we buy a ticket. We will watch it free, it is our film. He had to run it free for a week. Nobody would pay. They had decided that since it was made for them, the money made no sense.
He laughs telling it, but listen to what it costs and what it gives. The financial logic of going home is ruinous. The emotional logic is total. They think I am theirs, he said. Whatever the fight is, it is theirs, it is for them, and I am doing it. He paid for that belonging in the only currency the work earns, and he does not want it refunded.
This is not the story of an overlooked man who deserved more. He had the screen, Swarg and Shola Aur Shabnam and the drawing rooms of the country for years, and he chose the loss. A man who walks away from the centre to stand with the people who will not even buy his ticket is not a victim of the industry.
05 · The tarpaulin cinema
The festival is where the theory becomes infrastructure, and it is the part I came in knowing least and left most moved by.
He founded the Khajuraho International Film Festival under his Prayas banner, supported by the Madhya Pradesh culture department, and its signature is a thing called Tapra Talkies.<Ref n={8} /> These are cinemas built like jhopdis, tarpaulin and bamboo on the outside, LED screen and surround sound on the inside, raised against the backdrop of the UNESCO temples. He chose Khajuraho for two practical reasons he is candid about. It is already internationally known, so the festival borrows an identity it does not have to manufacture, and he could not carry the children of Bundelkhand to Bombay, so he carried Bombay to them. Anupam Kher, Shekhar Kapur, Govinda, and a tribute each year to an artist who has died, Sridevi one year, Rajesh Khanna and Shashi Kapoor in others.
But the real reason is the third one, and it is a defensive one. What was reaching those small towns, in a sixty kilometre radius with no theatre and no money for Netflix, was, in his blunt description, the cheap double meaning product local operators had started turning out, films he placed barely a step above pornography. He wanted, at minimum, to put clean commercial films in front of families, the kind you can watch sitting with your parents, so that a seventeen year old would not grow up believing that the gutter was what cinema is. Our proverb says cinema is the mirror of society, he said, and if that were the mirror these children were handed, it would kill them.
His line is exact and he gave me the proof of it. Someone once came to him offering Rakhi Sawant for a title called Natkhat Nayika. He said the people there would beat them both, and he declined. He does not call duplicate artists and he does not run the double meaning product, however well it sells in that radius. The benchmark he keeps is a single sentence, a film he can sit and watch with his own family. Past that there is no bar. You may speak against the government, you may take on religion as far as logic allows, he has stopped no film for either. The only thing he refuses is the gutter, and refusing it is the second seat again, the discipline of not being the loud thing in the frame.
The Tapra Talkies were almost an accident. The first year he put the films in the five star hotel halls, the wedding banquet rooms, and nobody came. The culture secretary asked him where the thousands were. He went out into the villages to find out, and the answer broke and made the festival in the same sentence. Dau, the villagers said, why did you walk us all the way inside the hotel, the guard would not let us in, we came by bullock cart and did not have the courage to pass the salutes and the marble. So he remembered the touring talkies of his own childhood, the bioscope tent, and built three huts with LED screens inside, cinema you did not have to be brave to enter. By his count they show eleven now, one international, one national to the festival’s theme, one commercial, the rest for the local people, and vans that carry films out to the villages that still cannot come.<Ref n={9} />
The story he tells inside that story is the one I keep returning to. An American film called Sold came one year, an English language film with subtitles, about a Nepali girl trafficked into a Kolkata brothel and the journalist who pulls her out.<Ref n={10} /> He ran it in the hall for the fifteen or twenty people it was meant for. The producer who had travelled with it wandered into a Tapra Talkie by mistake, saw the crowd, the air of the place, and walked into his office afterward and said her film had to run in that hut. He warned her. The audience there is village women, the film is in English with subtitles, there is no cultural bridge, a Nepali girl sold in Kolkata and an American who saves her, three worlds with no thread between them. She stayed anyway. They pulled in women from an NGO, and they wept through the whole thing. Not one word of dialogue they could read, a culture not theirs, and the subject reached them through the tarp.
There is a thread inside that screening he did not pull, and I will. Sushmita Mukherjee, his own wife, plays a woman called Mumtaz in Sold. The film that crossed every barrier in that hut had her in it the whole time, and he told the story as if it belonged only to the women who came to watch it.
That is the show’s whole thesis, sitting inside his anecdote without him reaching for it. Different viewers extract different truths from the same film. He had built a room where that could happen, and the proof walked in by accident.
And then the region did the thing he had been trying to make possible. The children there started making films back. He told me about a short from Katni, thirteen or fifteen minutes, a boy’s film about a notorious village kid who claims the goddess came to him in a dream and said the village would end within the year, and how the village, terrified, stops fighting, stops lying, becomes Ram Rajya, until they confront him and he tells them the old village did end, look, you are new people now. The same year, he said, a film at Cannes carried almost the identical premise, a world ending within a year. A friend who went every December to Khajuraho and every May to Cannes wrote to him, shocked, having seen the same content twice in two languages on two continents. Katni and Cannes, the same thought, and the one from Katni more authentic for having no urban mixture in it.
I had a Bundelkhand example of my own to give him, and I gave it. Khabar Lahariya, the all women rural news collective out of Banda, founded in 2002, mostly Dalit and Muslim women reporting in Bundeli on water and sand mining and caste violence, and the documentary made about them, Writing With Fire, the first Indian film nominated for the Academy Award for best documentary feature.<Ref n={11} /> He was floored. Regional, he kept saying, where to where these children are thinking. There is a quiet rhyme here that neither of us named in the room and I will name now. Khabar Lahariya, after the film carried their name to the Oscars, said publicly that the documentary showed only a part of what they do, that a part has a way of distorting the whole.<Ref n={12} /> Different viewers, different truths, even about the same women. The region he is trying to give a platform is already insisting on telling its own story its own way. That is not a problem with his project. It is the project working.
This is the second time the show has sat this long with a man who built cinema out of the soil he was born on. The first was Anuj Sharma in Chhattisgarh, the subject of an earlier episode I called <Link to="/episodes/episode-02" style={{ color: '#e8c47a' }}>Ramanuj, Before Anuj</Link>. Sharma chose to act and sing in Chhattisgarhi when the sensible career lay in Hindi, and he put a language the center had written off onto the screen. Bundela carried Bombay to Khajuraho rather than carry Khajuraho’s children to Bombay. Different states, different decades, the same refusal. There is one difference between them that matters. Sharma had a Chhattisgarhi cinema to belong to, an industry with its own stars and songs and audience. Bundela did not have a sustained Bundeli film industry to return to. Bundeli is folded into Hindi, kept off the Eighth Schedule, and split across two states the way the land is, so there was never an industry for him to carry home, only an audience to build from nothing. That is why his answer to the same problem was not a film but a festival, not a star system but a tarpaulin hut. Sharma could make films in his mother tongue. Bundela had first to make a place where films could be watched at all. Both men looked at the first seat, the Hindi mainstream the whole country is taught to want, and chose the chair beside it on purpose, because the work they had in them could only be done from there. It is the seat with the soil under it.
06 · Sabke apne Ram
We talked about Ram, and it became the clearest statement of the whole ethic he gave me on camera. He does not treat Ram as a thing to worship or a flag to wave. He treats him as a character you are meant to hold yourself against.
The Ram Mahotsav he runs in Orchha began with his own son. The boy, studying abroad, asked him one morning why he should worship Ram, who Ram even was, and Bundela took the question as a failure in the raising rather than a failure in the boy. The festival was his answer to it. For five years now he has run it, and the first thing he wanted me to understand is that they do not talk about religion in it. No pravachan, no kirtan, no jai. Those are happening anyway, everywhere. What he brings instead are the people who have written about Ram, who have done meemansa on Ram, vice chancellors and professors, the scholars from the Ramayana centres, the students from Bundelkhand and Chhatrasal universities bused in by the eleven o’clock. The thing he is trying to break, he said, is the slide into the merely religious. He wants the character returned to people as a character. Why do you say there is no brother like Ram, no son, no husband, no friend, and then never ask how much of that Ram is in you. He quotes a writer who argues that Kaikeyi, if she had wanted, could have taken a one year exile and crowned Bharat, that the fourteen years were planned, that Ram became Ram only by being sent, that a king who stayed a king would never have met the tribals, never built the army, never killed Ravana and then handed the kingdom to Ravana’s brother instead of keeping the gold of Lanka. He came back, Bundela noted, and went to meet Kaikeyi first, the one who by rights should have been his enemy, because he knew his whole transformation was her doing.
He chose Orchha for a reason that sits under the whole festival. It holds perhaps the most famous Ram in the country worshipped as a king rather than simply as a god, kept inside a palace, given a daily armed guard of honour, received by his people with paan and ittar in place of sweet prasad. Even here the figure is a person to be met, not an abstraction to be chanted at.
I put the new film to him. Namit Malhotra’s Ramayana, arriving Diwali 2026, two parts, the tagline Our Truth, Our History.<Ref n={13} /> I told him that from where I sit, in Hyderabad, far from Orchha, it seems to me that everyone has their own Ram.
सबके अपने राम हैं।
Darshim Saxena, from where she sits in Hyderabad
How does a man who has spent five years insisting Ram is a character to study read a line that says our truth, our history, in the singular.
He would not take the bait, and his refusal was the most interesting answer he gave. Some subjects, he said, you have to leave to themselves.
कुछ विषय उनके भरोसे छोड़ देने चाहिए।
Some subjects you must leave to themselves
There are moments in a life where you have to leave the decision to God and above God, not to yourself. He moved instead to Krishna, the figure closer to my Braj heart and his, the one who told each person to see him in whatever form they needed to see him. We do not need to tell you what we are, he said of Krishna, that is why he is the complete avatar, and Ram the maryada one. He associates himself into both. How much Krishna is in me, how much Ram. That is his comfort zone, he said, because if God is always with you, then leaving a tap running or a light burning or speaking ill of someone is an injustice, and in that moment the Ram in you is not there.
I had noticed by then that he finds himself in everything he respects. Two kinds of people, I told him. The ones who know they ought to honour a thing and so they do, dutifully, from the outside. And him, who finds his own reflection in it.
अपनी परछाईं हर चीज़ में ढूंढ लेते हैं आप।
Darshim Saxena, on the man beside her
He agreed without hedging. I associate myself, he said. That is where the meaning of life is. I cannot pick and choose. Wherever I am, if I associate myself there, living gets easier and relating to others gets easier. It is, when you set it next to everything else, the same move he makes everywhere. He does not stand outside the thing and admire it. He climbs into the chair beside it and works.
He is starting another festival, in Mahakal’s city of Ujjain, and the principle under it is the same one. The person who brings a film there, he said, will arrive having thought about it, the way a man who drinks still leaves the bottle outside the temple, not because Mahakal stops him but because the mirror does.
आईना रोकता है।
Darshim Saxena, gloss on what Mahakal does not need to do
Do the work with full faith and honesty and Mahakal is in it. My father used to tell me a line, I told him, karm hi pooja hai, the work itself is the worship, done without fear of the fruit.
कर्म ही पूजा है।
Darshim Saxena, a line inherited from her father
He took it like a man hearing his own sentence read back to him.
07 · The second seat at home
The longest and most surprising stretch of the conversation was about his wife, and it is where the philosophy stops being a public posture and becomes the architecture of a marriage of more than thirty years.
Sushmita Mukherjee is an NSD actor the country still calls Kitty, after the role in Karamchand, and a writer with real books to her name, a novel that took her eleven years and a collection of stories about the incomplete lives of complete women.<Ref n={14} /> She runs Rudrani Kalagram, the art village in Orchha, as its sanrakshika.<Ref n={15} /> He described their two upbringings as opposite directions, a Delhi woman raised in English and a Hindi belt boy who ran an agitation against the English language, and then said the thing that explained the marriage. We live in a no man’s land, he said, where we do not disturb each other. Her place is hers, my place is mine. What is right for me need not be right for her. Two separate personalities, full stop. When people ask him to bring the wife along to talk, he tells them she is a separate personality, go talk to her separately.
I pushed on whether that took years to build, and it did. He had decided, after many girlfriends, that Sushmita was the one he could raise a family with, that raising children well was as important a job as any, and he is the first to say he could not have done it. She is the good mother, he said, the part he and his family background could not have provided, and the children grew up independent and thinking not only about themselves but about the country, which in this climate is a large thing. He gave her the credit without performing the giving.
The wedding is the proof of the whole theory, and it is funny. He never wanted to marry. The day a girlfriend raised it, he would walk her to the door. Then he came home one evening to find his own building strung with bandhanwar and flowers and a shehnai going, asked the watchman whose function it was, climbed the stairs, and found Sushmita waiting in full bridal dress with two friends beside her.
आज सात तारीख है। तुमने कहा था ना।
Sushmita, on the appointed day
The seventh, the date he had once thrown out without meaning it. She was ready for a yes and ready for a no. That is such a Miranda thing to do, I told him, because I came through Miranda House myself and I know the move. He asked for one drink to think it over. She told him to have it or leave it, the answer was due now either way. He married her that night, no horse, no procession, a few friends he had phoned in a panic to say he was in trouble, the fire lit, the two of them in front of it. The Delhi girl became a Bundelkhandi bahu who took the language and the soil so completely that his family, he says, now loves her more than they love him.
But the line he gave her that stayed with me is the one where he refused the easy word. Asked what is most Sushmita about her, he did not say wife. This is the most independent thing she could have pulled off, he said, she is rather than wife a very good friend, a reliable friend. In a wife you can find a thousand faults. She is a perfect friend and guide and your wellwisher. And the proof he offered was not sentimental, it was administrative. When the festival has to be planned and executed, the thing whole families spend years dreaming about, is the organisation guaranteed because Sushmita is on it. Absolutely not, he laughed. She steps back. Her one fault, he said, is that she will not take responsibility, especially in a social cause, because she is afraid of being answerable, and this work cannot be done without being answerable. The village man takes the decision, he said, the less educated man, because he does not calculate the repercussions. The calculative mind weighs the loss, the family’s opinion, the safety, and then says no. The collective decisions of Khajuraho he takes himself, in the end, and tidies the rest.
Now read that beside everything before it. In the marriage, he is the one who steps in front, who answers to the public, who takes the seat that can be blamed. At home, in this one arena, he is the hero and she keeps the first seat empty. The position is not fixed to the man. It moves, the way Venkat’s episode first taught me. The seats are interchangeable, and the whole art is knowing which one you are sitting in today.
He resisted her opening a theatre company once, and the reason is the cleanest window into his fear. Theatre, in his telling, makes you mature and then traps you in an inferiority complex you cannot climb out of, the big beard and the khadi kurta and the sense that the world owes you and never pays. He was scared of it for himself. Cinema lets you go to sleep believing you will finish Shah Rukh off tomorrow if you get the role. Theatre’s gauge is only the three hundred people in the hall, and you cannot tear through three hundred people into the kind of aura Naseeruddin Shah became. So he steered her toward a production company instead, toward the larger audience, and kept his Prayas and her stage work entirely separate, two independent lives that respect a border. He is, I think, a man who has thought very hard about the difference between the room that frees you and the room that closes around you, and he has spent his life choosing rooms.
08 · The closet writer
He said one thing about her he had never said anywhere else, and he knew it as it left him. I have never said this before, he told me, I am saying it today, Sushmita is my biggest competitor. He meant the writing. She is the better one, the one with the flavour, while he writes only what his own work needs, the way Raj Kapoor and V. Shantaram built their own subjects without ever calling themselves writers. He said it like a man conceding a match he is glad to lose.
What he could not have known is how precisely her life answers the show’s quietest question, which is who gets to be named as the author of the work. For years, by her own account, Sushmita wrote for the family production house without the public authorship that later became central to her own work. She has said that the acknowledgment never came and that watching her own words move on the screen was joy enough, which is the most forgiving account of being uncredited I have read. She called herself a closet writer who kept the writing hidden so the acting would not end. One screenplay from those years did carry her name and won her an NFDC award, for Nati. The authorship she had handed away for two decades she took back in her own name only from 2018, the novel first and then Baanjh, eleven stories about the incomplete lives of complete women, the title lifted from the word flung at a woman who cannot bear a child, baanjh, barren, as though the lack were always hers to hold. A woman who spent half her writing life unnamed wrote a book about the women society will not call whole. She did her English at Miranda House, which is my college too, a thing I did not know until I went looking, and it rearranged how I heard him name her his competitor.<Ref n={16} />
09 · The discipline was always Alkazi’s
When I asked whether NSD ever helped the politician, whether the training showed up on the campaign stage, he corrected the premise. Politics taught him nothing, he said. He taught himself, from theatre, three things, and he counted them.
A commitment that is total, not the politician’s casual it will happen, we will come, we will take it tomorrow. A hundred percent or nothing, which is why the NSD lot, he said, will do three films a year when they could do ten, the way Nawazuddin says he barely manages three. Answerability, because what you say is yours and you cannot push it onto anyone else. And the last one, the best one, the one he saved. In theatre, when the actor across from you forgets his line or gives you the wrong one, you do not stop. You keep going. You learn to improvise and you carry the scene. In politics, the same. If the man across from you is wrong, is forgetting his responsibility, turning his face from it, you continue. You do not forget your aim because he forgot his line. You do your part and finish what you were called to do.
There it is, the whole inheritance, and it traces straight back to the seven o’clock curtain and the Prime Minister kept waiting in the dark. The man who taught him that time is a moral fact was the same man who built India’s modern theatre out of pure discipline, and Bundela took the discipline out of the rehearsal room and ran a thirty year statehood campaign on it, and a film festival, and a marriage, and a Ram festival that refuses to become religious. People say a corrupt politician is just acting, he told me near the end, and he would not allow it. Acting is an art. Acting is a technique. It is not available to everyone. He meant it as a defence of his craft. I heard it as the quiet boast of a man who knows the difference between holding a line and faking one, and has spent his life on the first.
10 · The first seat is still empty
I keep coming back to the empty chair beside him, and to the fact that he filled it with a theology without being asked.
The first seat is empty because that is where God sits, if God shows up to do the work. The second seat is where he sits, doing it in the meantime, never pretending to be the one who could finish it with a single reel. He has lost the statehood fight for thirty years and it has not soured him, because the second seat is built for a fight you may not win in your lifetime. He went home and they would not buy his ticket and he calls it love. He gave his wife the higher chair at home and the higher respect in the family and calls it the most independent thing she ever did. He climbs into Ram and Krishna and Mahakal and the supporting role and the divided region and finds his own face in each, and works from beside it.
A living archive, the introduction said. I will revise it now that I have sat with him. He is not the record of a finished thing. He is a man who worked out, very young, in a house where the word for performer was an insult, that the centre was never going to be offered to him, and who built an entire life on the discovery that the chair beside the centre is the one with all the leverage. The hero kills the villain and hands out the happiness and the film ends. The character actor stays after the lights come up, in the second seat, keeping the first one warm for whatever comes next.
When the cameras stopped he laughed that I had made him talk more than he had in his whole life, that nobody had ever held him in a chair this long, and that he would have to come back to Hyderabad to finish what we started. Then he did the thing that tells you who he is. He asked me to come to Orchha. I went, not long after, to the town that holds the only Ram who is a king, and the man who keeps the first seat empty hosted me with a warmth that asked for nothing in return. The host had become the guest. The seats had changed places one more time, the way he told me they always do.
That is the thing he handed me, in the end. A different account of what a career is for.
Episode 03
Mere Focus Ki Love Story — Venkat Alexa
A companion essay to the two episodes recorded with Venkat Alexa. Twenty-two years of focus, eight hundred commercials, one new producer.
Watch Part 1 on YouTube
Watch Part 2 on YouTube
In the first week of May 2026, the Tamil Film Producers Council called a token strike. Producers stopped work for a day to say that the fees of actors and technicians had become unsustainable, and to demand that remuneration move toward a revenue-share model. Technicians answered that producers were not paying even the minimum on time. The week that argument was in the papers, a man sat down on the recliner of The Second Seat who has spent his working life on both ends of it. For more than two decades he was the technician whose payment arrived late or never. Today he is the producer who messages the union for the wage ledger of every craft before his shoot begins.
His name is P. Venkateshwara Rao. The industry calls him Venkat Alexa.
Alexa is not his surname. It is the name of a camera. When the ARRI Alexa came to India, the image of Indian cinema began to change. Light behaved differently. Skin recorded differently. Night recorded differently. And one of the first hands in the country to understand that new digital image belonged to Venkat, a focus puller from Hyderabad working out of Chennai. Set by set, take by take, camera by camera, the industry replaced his father’s name with the name of a German machine. He never corrected it. By the end of our conversation I understood why. The renaming was not an erasure. It was a record of work, the only kind of credit a first assistant cameraman usually gets, written into the one place no title card can reach: how people address you.
This essay sits beside the two episodes the way the research sat beside the recliner during the recording. The episodes are his voice. This is the homework, and the argument the homework kept making to me afterwards. The argument is the same one The Second Seat has been making since Episode One: recognition, not sympathy. Nobody on that recliner has ever asked to be pitied, and Venkat asked least of all. What he asked, in almost every answer, was that we understand what the work actually is. So that is what this essay tries to do.
01 · A Man Named After a Camera
To understand the name, you have to understand the machine, and to understand the machine you have to go back before it.
ARRI’s first serious attempts at digital cinematography were the Arriflex D-20 and D-21, cumbersome rental-only cameras that recorded high-definition video. The D-21 had no memory cards at all. It pushed its image out through cables into an external recorder, a deck loaded with cassettes, and by 2008 there were just fifty-six of these cameras at thirteen rental houses in the entire world. Venkat remembers the Indian end of this arithmetic from the inside: a camera body, two or three cables, a Sony recorder, a cassette that went straight from the set to the DI suite. The footage was 1920 by 1080. Not even 2K. That was the frontier.
Then, at IBC Amsterdam in September 2009, ARRI showed three wooden mock-ups of a new camera and gave it a woman’s name. The Alexa shipped in mid 2010, with a Super 35 sensor rated at 2.8K, the ability to record ProRes internally and uncompressed ARRIRAW to external Codex recorders, and a sensor so good that cinematographers still defend it fifteen years later. It is the camera that finally persuaded the holdouts of film to cross over. Robert Richardson took it onto Hugo. Roger Deakins followed a year later. And in Chennai, a rental house owner looked at the crates arriving from Germany and London and made an offer to his staff: the company will train whoever is interested.
Almost nobody was. Venkat told us why, and the reason is the most honest sentence about labour in either episode. The rental unit boys preferred to go on shoots, because shoots paid daily money and training paid nothing. He was an apprentice then, a third and fourth assistant, earning around four hundred rupees a day. The owner put it to him plainly: this is the next life. Learn it and you will get a life out of it.
What follows is a self-education story that should be taught at film schools, partly because it happened entirely outside one. He bought a laptop. He recharged data packs on his phone, four and five gigabytes at a time, in the years when 3G itself was a purchase you thought about. He taught himself the vocabulary of the new machine, resolution, dynamic range, depth of field, lens behaviour, and then carried his doubts to the most credible examiner available to a Chennai camera assistant of that era: Madhu Ambat. The timing of that examiner matters. Venkat frames the period through a pairing every southern technician of his generation would recognise: P.C. Sreeram was the cinematographer working with Mani Ratnam, and Madhu Ambat was the one who had gone further out, who had shot M. Night Shyamalan’s debut feature Praying with Anger in 1992 and later Wide Awake, one of the first Indian cinematographers to photograph a Hollywood production. When the ARRI technicians visited, Venkat noted down every line they said, took the notes to Madhu Ambat, and asked him to explain the differences. Cross-checking, he calls it. Every line, cross-checked.
Two months into the new cameras, P.C. Sreeram himself came to the rental house to inspect the operation, looked at what the apprentice had absorbed, and delivered the verdict Venkat repeated to us with visible delight: this guy is trained well, no need for the German or London person. The owner sent him out on ten commercials as a test. No complaints came back. He was made first assistant, told to train two others, and within months was the in-house instructor for every new camera arriving from London and Germany. By his own count, fifteen to twenty-five camera assistants passed through his hands, learning white balance, ISO, shutter, frame rates, timecode and sound sync, the entire grammar that film stock had never asked of them. His day rate moved from four hundred rupees to a few thousand. He never looked back at film. Two or three years as an apprentice and assistant on celluloid, he says, and then twenty-two unbroken years in digital. Digital is giving more life to me, he told us, and in his mouth the sentence is not a metaphor. It is an income statement.
The name arrived somewhere in this stretch, and the episodes let us date its logic precisely. Venkat’s account of Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola, Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2013 satire with Pankaj Kapur, Imran Khan and Anushka Sharma, is the account of a technology transfer. He remembers it as India’s first ARRIRAW feature, a first the public record gestures at but does not settle, shot at 2.8K when the Codex recorder unlocked raw recording on the Alexa, with the camera carried up from Chennai and ARRI’s own people from Germany staying on the set for the full sixty-day schedule. If any mistake happened, the protocol on that floor was three words long: Venkat will do. A German engineering company sent its camera into Hindi cinema and the human warranty on the package was a Telugu focus puller. After that, what else was the industry going to call him?
There is one more detail in this section of his life that I want to put on the record, because it captures how the man thinks. He did not stop at the camera. He sat in on DI sessions at the post house until he could supervise a grade himself. He sat beside lighting crews on sets where he had no lighting duties, because, as he put it, if you observe, at least fifty percent of the work you can learn easily. His theory of education is a theory of proximity: one month near one DOP gives you four or five points, ten DOPs in a year gives you fifty. You will not get this on Instagram, he said. It is on field only. Then he reached for the comparison that stayed with me longest. A two-year-old child does not learn words at home. You take the child out, and the child catches language one word at a time from the world. Same learning process here.
Venkat will do.
ARRI’s engineers, on the floor of Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola, 2013
02 · The Mathematics of Five Feet
What does a focus puller actually do? The episodes contain the cleanest answer I have heard, and it is worth setting down before any of the stories, because every story depends on it.
The lens has a focus ring. The ring is marked in distances. The focus puller’s job is to know, at every instant of a moving shot, the exact distance between the lens and the thing that must stay sharp, and to turn the ring so that the marked distance and the real distance never disagree. That is the whole job, and it is unforgiving in a way almost nothing else on a set is. Colour can be corrected in the DI. A warm tungsten cast can be cooled in post. Framing can be cheated, but only because resolution bought the room, and the room is bought every morning. Once a shoot starts, the day’s resolution is fixed, and cinematographers fix it as high as the body allows, 4.5K, 5.6K, the Sony Venice 2 climbing to 8.6K, because maximum resolution is maximum forgiveness afterwards, in colour, in reframing, in everything the DI can reach. His teaching example was Eega, the film Hindi audiences met as Makkhi. Shoot the fly in HD, he said, and there is a fly there, that much will be known. Shoot it at 4K and above and you get the wing movement, the close-up with the eyes, jaan aa jaati hai. The price of that life is storage: a minute of HD weighs about three gigabytes, a minute of modern uncompressed raw runs past thirty. And focus is the exception to all this forgiveness. Focus cannot be fixed. What you captured on location, that exact sharpness, is all you will ever have. If focus is out, the only fix is to go back and shoot again, and on day ninety-one of a hundred-day schedule, with the light gone and the star’s dates finished, going back does not exist.
So Venkat watches actors the way nobody else in the cinema hall watches them. He told us this with a flatness that sounded almost like a vow. The artist is doing comedy, talking seriously, crying. For us it is not important. What is important is: five feet, seven feet, six feet. Is the face coming toward the camera or going away. Is it sharp or is it not. While the rest of the unit reads the performance, the focus puller reads the distance to the performance.
आप विराट कोहली हो, महेंद्र सिंह हो, रजनीकांत हो, शाहरुख़ ख़ान हो, हम लोगों का सम्बन्ध नहीं है। You are crying there, laughing, giving dialogue, हमको सम्बन्ध नहीं। मुझे focus perfect मिला कि नहीं, बस इतना है।
Venkat Alexa, on what the focus puller reads instead of the performance
Four of the largest names across two languages, flattened by the job into moving objects at five, six, seven feet. He does not queue for photographs between setups either, he told us, even when the whole unit does. I sit with my focus every hour, he said, and then produced the sentence this essay is named after.
ये जो मैं काम कर रहा हूँ, ये मेरे और मेरे focus की love story है। बस इतनी।
Venkat Alexa
Out of this arithmetic comes everything the audience experiences as cinema’s eye. When a frame holds a circle of friends outside a college and you know, without being told, which one is the hero, you know it because the focus told you. Shift focus, Venkat explained: who is the first preferable person to put the focus on, and who is not. The director narrates the scene, the focus puller maps the narration onto distances, and the audience’s eye goes exactly where the rack sends it. Recognition is literally manufactured at the focus ring. The hierarchy of a frame, who matters in it and who is texture, is executed by a man counting feet.
And it gets stranger, because the focus puller is also a silent participant in what we call a star’s aura. Venkat described the mechanics without a gram of mystification. The DOP watches the blocking and tells the artist: sir, if you come from here to here, the light will flare behind you. Sir, you look beautiful. A mark is set where the flare lands, because that flare looks like heroism. The focus puller readies his marks to that spot. The actor walks, the sun catches, the audience gasps. When I asked him where aura is made, by the actor, the audience, the director’s vision, he gave the only answer a technician would: it is made in the coordination. The screen is a meeting point, I suggested, between the people on one side making the image and the people on the other side believing it, and the aura lives in the middle, a conspiracy of both. Milibhagat was my word for it, a collusion, and an affectionate one. He did not object.
The one place he declined my frame was gender. I asked how the camera’s way of looking at women has changed across his two decades and more: the older grammar in which a heroine had to look like a heroine, lit apart from the world she stood in, against the newer effort, by image-makers like Ranjith and Murali Krishnan, to let a woman on screen look like she belongs to the community the story is about. It is the kind of question an eager guest absorbs and answers back in borrowed sociology. Venkat refused the loan. Society ki vajah se, he said, mujhe utna idea nahi hai. But there are changes happening. Pressed between a wedding scene from the nineties and one from today, the difference he would certify was lighting and equipment: the lights changed, film became digital, 2K climbed toward 8.5K, baaki poora same hai. For the lens, men, women and children are one subject. The lenses are the same, the exposure is one, and what shifts for a woman’s frame is skin tone work and lighting. There is a way to read this as evasion. I read it as the strictest honesty in the episodes: a technician marking the limits of his own authority, declining ideological credit for a changed gaze that he executed but did not author. The instructions come from elsewhere. What he would concede was the tempo of his trade, the only register in which he measures anything: every six months, update.
The marks themselves are a small anthropology of actors. Some performers, the experienced ones, the Naseeruddins and Shabanas and Pankaj Kapurs of his telling, take four pages of dialogue and land them in a single take, stopping on a coin. With them, you place your focus marks before they have even entered the shot, because their bodies are instruments that repeat. He was careful here, in a way I respected: I have not worked with all of them, he said, so I cannot speak beyond what I saw. Others have a rhythm that will not be told where to go. For them, the DOP quietly protects his boy: I will not give you full open, I will stop down one or two stops, take the depth and manage with general marks. Depth of field, in other words, is not only an aesthetic. It is an insurance policy one craftsman writes for another.
Which is why the most expensive object on a set can be hostage to the cheapest decision on a lens. Venkat offered a thought experiment he has clearly run on real floors. An art director builds a ten-crore set. The DOP opens the lens fully. The background dissolves into blur, and the ten crores, or a hundred, dissolve with it. Who knows this is happening, in the moment it is happening? The focus puller knows. On location, he said, the focus puller will know first. It is one of the quiet theses of these episodes: in the chain of image-making, the person most often described as junior is frequently the first sensor of error, for focus, for camera settings, for a frame rate that will flicker against a tube light. The hierarchy of the credits and the hierarchy of perception are two different maps.
He is equally unsentimental about the technology that was supposed to replace him. Autofocus cine lenses arrived. They failed. Follow-focus systems with a tracking sensor in the actor’s pocket arrived, and they fail the moment anyone crosses the frame, because the sensor faithfully racks to the interruption. By his account even Hollywood has bought only a couple of sets, while India releases fifty or sixty films every Friday, every one of them focused by hand. There is a larger conversation hiding behind that, about machines and the rest of his profession’s future, and it belongs at the end of this essay, where he put it himself.
03 · Father and Son
Every craft has a primary relationship, and the focus puller’s is with the cinematographer. Venkat named it before I could: father and son. If the focus is missed, the father gets beaten. The director does not stop to apportion blame within the camera department. He turns to the DOP, and the line Venkat quoted, with the timing of a man who has heard it more than once, is delivered like a complaint to a parent.
साब, तुम्हारा लड़का है, देख लो।
The director’s line, to the cinematographer, when focus slips
What makes the relationship live is that it runs on glances. A take is rolling. The DOP, eye at the viewfinder, keeps one corner of his attention on his focus puller’s hands. If something slips, no one shouts during the shot, because the director’s narration and the actor’s performance are sacred. The DOP and the focus puller talk with their eyes. A flick of a look: mistake. The answer travels back the same way: adjusting, done. The take ends, and only then, quietly, sorry sir, one more. Two men protecting an image and each other simultaneously, in silence, at twenty-four frames a second. If these both are syncing, Venkat said, the photography comes extraordinary. If they are not, the entire shoot goes out in mismatches and misunderstandings, and it does not matter who is standing behind them, Sanjay Leela Bhansali or anyone else.
He has had two fathers, and the episodes are partly a portrait of each.
The first is Madhu Ambat. FTII gold medallist of 1973, around two hundred and fifty films across nine languages, three National Awards for Best Cinematography, for G.V. Iyer’s Sanskrit Adi Shankaracharya in 1984, for Sringaram in 2006, and for Salim Ahamed’s Adaminte Makan Abu in 2010. Venkat worked nearly eight films with him, and the working method he described is a masterclass in how knowledge actually moves on an Indian set. It exists for a reason Venkat stated plainly, and the essay will not soften it into seniority. Madhu Ambat, he told us, is sixty-five now, and at thirty-five a paralysis took part of his leg and hand. He is not moving, in any functional sense, and has not been for half his working life. The chair beside the camera is not a senior man’s prerogative. It is the workstation of a craftsman whose body stopped cooperating at the midpoint of his career and whose eye never did. Three of his National Awards came after that chair. So the master kept the student beside him and used him as his hands. Venkat, change the white balance, I will tell you. Now change the frames. There is flicker in the tube light, put ninety-six and check. Shutter se control karo. The student turned the knobs, the master read the result, and every adjustment came with its reason attached. Venkat asked his questions in the gaps: sir, here you are using tungsten, here daylight, so the white balance changes how? The answers, he says, gave him a knowledge no manual carried. When the Malayalam industry had no digital cameras of its own in those early years, it was Venkat who travelled the kit from Chennai to Kerala for Madhu Ambat’s shoots. Fourteen Malayalam films sit in his ledger from that corridor, including, the shoot card reminds me, the Salim Ahamed and Mammootty films that grew out of the Adaminte Makan Abu partnership. He counts five films with Mammootty in all.
The second is Santosh Sivan, with whom he did fewer films but among them Thuppakki, the Vijay film whose every frame moves, the mass cinema end of his range. Venkat’s sketch of Santosh Sivan on a set is the sketch of a man who compresses: given three scenes of twelve shots each, he converts twelve into six, because he already knows which side to take the scene from, and the day finishes without the quality dropping. That, Venkat said, is the difference experience makes, the experience of having worked Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Bombay and Hollywood floors and knowing what each one taught.
And then there is the film where his two fathers met, which the research surfaced rather than the recliner. Makaramanju, Lenin Rajendran’s 2011 Malayalam film about a passage in the life of the painter Raja Ravi Varma. The man cast to play Ravi Varma was Santosh Sivan, in his acting debut. The man photographing him was Madhu Ambat. One of India’s great cinematographers acting as the father of the modern Indian image, photographed by another of India’s great cinematographers, in a film about the very question these episodes circle: who makes the picture, and who gets remembered for it. Somewhere near that camera, on the focus, stood the student of both. Venkat mentioned the film in passing, one credit among credits. It is the kind of coincidence that is not a coincidence at all. It is what a life inside the image looks like from outside.
One more thing belongs in this section, because the father-and-son frame can hide it. The protection runs both ways, and it extends past the camera department. Venkat mapped a whole nervous system of mutual cover on a set. The gaffer protects the focus puller, because depth of field is built out of light, and when a shot is too hard the DOP’s solution is often a sentence to the gaffer: increase the light, cut the exposure, give him depth. The sound recordist protects the cinematographer, warning the camera attendants when an internal audio setting is going to shame the department in post. The generator operator, the man nobody in the audience has ever thought about, holds the flicker of every light on the location in his throttle hand; if he quietly saves diesel, the entire night’s footage strobes. There is an interlinking, Venkat said, generator, sound, camera, gaffer, focus puller, all of it depending on the cinematographer, and the cinematographer and director like father and son above them again. The set, in his description, is not a hierarchy. It is a family structure, with everything that word carries: protection, scolding, debts, and the absolute knowledge of who gets beaten first when something breaks. First the focus puller, he confirmed, laughing. Then the father.
04 · Fifty Kilos of Loban
When Kaali Khuhi released on Netflix in October 2020, the reviews agreed on exactly one thing. Film Companion opened by saying that fog plays a leading role in the film, rolling over the land like a silent witness from the night-time opening to the dawn of the last shot. High On Films called Sejal Shah’s cinematography the primary reason the film stays afloat. Critics who found the storytelling flat still surrendered to the look: the yawning dark spaces, the desolate Punjab night, the mist the girls walk through. Not one review I could find asked what the fog was made of.
Venkat was on that fog. Here is what it was made of.
Loban. Benzoin resin, the same material that smokes in temples and dargahs. The film, Terrie Samundra’s debut feature about a Punjab village cursed by its history of female infanticide, needed an entire village dark at night, a moon source behind, and mist for the girls to walk through, because girls in that village do not walk under street lights, they walk alone toward the forest. To build that mist, the unit burned, by Venkat’s count, fifty kilograms of loban every night, sourced continuously from four or five states, for thirty-five to forty nights, somewhere around sixteen hundred kilograms of temple resin across the schedule, burned to make a metaphor. Shoot from six in the evening to six in the morning. Pack up at six, and then wait two or three more hours for the haze to clear off the land, because the village had to give its air back before the day could use it. Every reviewer who praised the film’s atmosphere was praising, without knowing it, a supply chain.
The location sharpened everything. They were shooting in a village some thirty-five kilometres inside from Amritsar, in places barely a hundred or two hundred metres from the border fencing. The army briefed the unit on arrival, and Venkat repeated the briefing to us almost word for word: the villagers have ID cards and property across the fencing, they cross and return by evening, but you people are new, and if you go within a hundred metres of the fence and a bullet comes from the other side, that is the end, and it is no one’s concern. The film about a village’s buried violence was shot under a live instruction about lines you do not cross. Venkat noted, with the researcher’s respect one craftsman pays another, that the village and its subject were real, that the director was a woman born here who went to America young, heard the story, came back, researched it, took it directly to Netflix and brought the budget home herself. The public record matches him: Samundra grew up between a village in Punjab, a farming town in Missouri and coastal California, and shot the film near where she was raised. Picture is good, Venkat said, but it did not go. Even his disappointments are precise.
Now put the focus puller inside that fog. The DOP was Sejal Shah, Venkat’s boss of nine and a half years, a Mumbai ad-world veteran with hundreds of commercials behind him and features from London Dreams to Bodyguard to Bejoy Nambiar’s Solo, on which Venkat also worked. Venkat describes Shah’s style with the mixture of pride and suffering that defines the focus puller’s lot: he experiments constantly, and he uses no lights. No lights. Entire scenes at full open aperture, at night, in smoke, with a child actor and senior artists moving through a village. Full open means there is no depth of field to forgive you. The eye is sharp and the ear is already soft. Five to ten shots a night was the entire output, take after take, because at that aperture in that haze one focus slip kills the shot, and the mood that took an hour of resin to build cannot be ordered back for one more. Focus out one time in a difficult situation, Venkat said, khatam. Finished. Time and money depend on focus. People think focus is nothing, camera on, focus done. But it is not possible to adjust in post. There is no option. What you held on location is what the film has.
This is where the recognition argument stops being rhetoric and becomes physics. When we say a film is beautifully shot, we are usually crediting one name. The image of Kaali Khuhi that the critics loved is, at minimum, the resin burners hauling their fifty-kilo sacks across state lines, the gaffer building a moon, the generator man holding his cycles steady all night, the DOP refusing lights, and a focus puller keeping a ten-year-old sharp at full open in smoke a hundred metres from an international border. None of this diminishes Sejal Shah. Venkat would be the first to put the DOP at the head of the family, and he did, in so many words, when I pushed him on the National Award question. But the image is not protected by one person alone. That sentence is on the shoot card. After this episode it reads less like a thesis and more like a measurement.
There is a coda to the sensitivity question. The film’s subject was the killing of girls, and its lead was a girl, the young Riva Arora, with Shabana Azmi as the senior-most artist on the floor. I asked how the camera department carries a subject like that. His answer was technical first, because his answers are always technical first: light with mood effect, mist in the background, higher resolution and higher frame rates to build the feeling, time-taking process, shot perfect with the DOP. The fuller answer came when we talked about the children on that same call sheet, and it belongs in the next section, because it is bigger than one film.
05 · Children, Bears and Generators
Everything in Section 02, the marks, the pre-placed focus points, the choreography of distances, works because adult professionals repeat. Children do not repeat, and Venkat’s account of what the camera department does about it amounts to a quiet ethics. He spelled the protocol out when our conversation reached Kaali Khuhi, where the call sheet ran from Shabana Azmi, the senior-most artist on the floor, to a girl of ten or eleven, in dark scenes about dead girls. You cannot give a child marks. So you do not. You tell the child: jo aap khelna hai khelo, hum sambhalenge. Play whatever you want to play, stay in your zone, we will manage. You explain gently where the camera’s attention will be, you ask them to look out for the crew a little, and then the crew absorbs the entire technical burden the child has been excused from. I asked him to confirm what I thought I was hearing, that instead of pressuring a child toward the hundred percent, the crew deliberately takes the overload onto itself, and he confirmed it without hesitation: one hundred percent, because the night will stretch, one o’clock, two o’clock, and that pressure comes on us. It is the most humane sentence in the episodes and he delivered it as workflow. The marks system bends so the child does not have to.
It was not his first set built around a child. In 2013 he worked on Thanga Meenkal, the director Ram’s film about a father and his nine-year-old daughter, produced in part by Gautham Vasudev Menon, with Ram himself in the lead. The film won Best Tamil Film at the 61st National Awards, and its child lead, Sadhana, won the National Film Award for Best Child Artist, thanking Ram appa and Gautham Menon uncle and a row of other uncles in her acceptance message before going on, years later, to Peranbu. A focus puller’s filmography keeps its own private index, and in Venkat’s, two of the films that travelled furthest are films that asked his department to hold a child’s face steady without ever making the child carry the holding.
Around the children, the set itself keeps inventing problems, and the second half of this section is a catalogue of the ones Venkat has personally absorbed, because the texture matters more than any summary of it.
The lens fogs from air conditioning. A full-AC indoor set, a lunch break, and the next shot is dead for thirty or forty minutes because the front and back glass of the lens have bloomed with condensation, and you wait, reducing the AC, for the water film to leave. Cold outdoor locations, Kullu, Manali, Kashmir, do the same; heat only warms the camera body, which can be cooled, but cold fogs the glass, which can only be waited out.
The generator flickers. The lights you see as steady are a negotiation between the gaffer’s load calculation and the generator operator’s cycling, and if the operator trims the intensity to save diesel, the flicker arrives in the footage before anyone’s eye catches it on the floor.
The camera does not turn on. Venkat’s origin story of vigilance is a blast sequence from his apprentice days in Chennai: four cars rigged to explode, multiple cameras set, everyone ready, and one camera attendant who forgot to roll. The cars went up. The cut was called. The attendant said, sir, this take will be very good. The shoot was damaged, the cars were ash, and the lesson entered Venkat’s spine: check the equipment every second, because some shots, a blast, a bungee jump, do not offer a second take at any price.
The wildlife does not read call sheets. On a Thanga Meenkal song shoot in the forests of Wayanad, the unit climbed a hill and met a bear. Fifteen, twenty people on one side, one animal on the other, and the arithmetic of who manages whom settled itself. On Peraanmai, S. P. Jananathan’s 2009 forest film with Jayam Ravi, shot in the hills around Thekkady, they worked with real elephants at distance and a Hollywood Terminator on the call sheet: Roland Kickinger, the Austrian who wore the T-800’s body in Terminator Salvation, twenty days as the villain in the Kerala forests. The whole unit held silence around all of it, machine man and animals alike, because an elephant triggers, and an incident means the movie stops. On another Kerala village shoot, the unit filmed scenic frames of a settlement, only to be told at the edit table to look closer at what was growing in them. The location was a ganja village, already known to the police. A separate day, a different village, a reshoot. The image had to be relocated because the land inside it had a record.
I am listing these not as anecdotes but as a definition. This is what below-the-line means: the layer of the film where weather, diesel, animals, condensation, borders, narcotics and human forgetfulness are all live inputs, and where the job is to deliver, out the other side of all of it, a sharp frame that betrays none of it. When the frame succeeds, the audience sees mood. The crew sees the resin and the fuel gauge.
And the body keeps the minutes. A full camera setup runs to thirty or thirty-five kilos, easy enough on a studio floor, brutal on outdoor moves. Venkat has dislocated both shoulders across the years and reported it to us the way one reports mileage. The deeper exertion is mental, and he located it exactly: if there is a fight at home, money not sent, a quarrel in the mind, the doubt enters the hands and the focus goes. One focus out and a hundred people turn to look at who did it. Ninety days of a hundred-day schedule can pass without an error, and on the ninety-first day one shot goes soft and the director says into the mic, what are you watching, one more, and ninety days of izzat, of earned standing, go with it. His verdict on this is the plainest sentence in either episode.
हम लोग भगवान नहीं है।
Venkat Alexa, on the mistakes that come in any hundred-day schedule
Mistakes come, one hundred percent. What exists between the focus puller and the DOP, between the DOP and the director, between the director and the producer, is what exists between a wife and a husband: relationship, understanding, and adjustment. By day three of a fifty-day schedule, he says, the unit is a team, and even the artist accepts a sorry sir and goes again.
06 · Twenty Seconds and Two and a Half Hours
Here is a number that reorganises everything you think you know about who makes Indian images. For one day of work on a feature film, Venkat charges around four thousand rupees. For one day on an advertisement, around thirty thousand. When I asked him which he prefers, cinema or ads, he answered before the question finished: ads, ads, ads. And then, because he is constitutionally incapable of leaving a motive unexamined, he gave the full sentence: ads are for money. Movies are for name, so that the market knows this work, this film, this man. The honesty was so complete it took the air out of the usual art-versus-commerce conversation before we could have it.
His advertising life is its own filmography. Eight hundred to nine hundred commercials by his count, the show’s research putting the floor at eight hundred plus, across Kia, Hyundai, Volkswagen, Maruti Suzuki, Honda, Ashok Leyland, Mahindra, Tata, Toyota, the entire automotive shelf of the Indian market, much of it with Sejal Shah, whom he calls the master of cars, bikes and heavy trucks. Six ads with Dhoni. Eight to twelve with Virat Kohli. Tractor commercials with Yuvraj Singh in Punjab, where, he noted with a location scout’s appreciation, the houses are so genuinely grand that production designers have nothing to build and owners lend their farmhouses for shoots free. Six or seven ads with Ayushmann Khurrana. Ten to twelve flights a month, Delhi today, Jaipur tomorrow, Dehradun, Kullu, Kashmir, Kolkata, because his boss does ten to twelve ads a month and each one is a different state. I love moving, moving, moving, he said, the triple all his own, and the focus puller’s restlessness, trained on moving subjects for more than two decades, finally made biographical sense.
The scale of the form is invisible from the couch. He described a Mahindra XUV500 film shot in Jordan, near holy geography by his telling: horses brought in from Pakistan, performers brought in from Afghanistan, fifteen brand-new cars shipped from India, twelve of them damaged in eight days of shooting, something like eight crore rupees spent, two and a half minutes of finished footage, and a final television cut of twenty-two seconds. A feature buys two and a half hours of your attention with its budget; an ad buys twenty seconds, which is why, frame for frame, advertising is the most expensive image India makes. And the calibration has gone global under his feet. A Toyota shoot four months before our recording covered five of the company’s brands in six days, for distribution to seventy countries. Kia, manufacturing in India for five or six years now, sells into roughly seventy markets and sends its films along. The versions change with the passport: each country’s important artists are shot for each country’s cut, because, as he put it, the emotion changes too. A twenty-second commercial made in India is not one image. It is seventy calibrations of desire wearing the same car.
He stepped back to the wide shot exactly once in four hours, and it was here. The world’s highest count of film releases belongs to India, more than any country, including China, and China, he pointed out, is one country with one language. Here, travel five hundred kilometres and the language changes. He has worked in five of them. The ad world’s seventy-country precision and the cinema’s five-language sprawl are the same fact seen from two sides: there is no single Indian audience, only distances. He is a man trained to measure distance.
In an ad, he explained, the product is the hero and the frame is built backwards from it: the phone in the hand must hold focus, the face behind it negotiates for second place, the family on the sofa is lit and exposed so the warmth reads as real and not fake, and the focus goes where the money is. In a movie, the mood is the hero and everyone gets their close-up. Ads ka kaam alag hai, movie ka kaam alag hai, one hundred percent.
And yet the wall between the two is thinner than either side admits, and the episodes kept finding the doors in it. Historically, advertising is where digital cinema won India first. Venkat walked us through the economics from the inside: in the celluloid era, a big star’s ad shot on film, but a small ad, a snack packet with a new face, could not justify ten or fifteen cans of stock, so digital’s one-card, shoot-all-day promise cut a two-lakh stock day to twenty thousand and the small-budget ad film went digital en masse, years before features dared. The Alexa’s Indian beachhead was the thirty-second spot. The features followed the ads, which means the look of contemporary Indian cinema was beta-tested on shampoo.
The traffic runs the other way too. Sejal Shah’s no-lights experiments, refined across hundreds of commercials, walked into Kaali Khuhi intact. The desire machinery is shared: I put it to Venkat that an ad sells the product by selling the dream around it, and that cinema sells dreams too, that nobody buys the hero’s bungalow but everyone takes the sapna home, along with a thought, a relationship, an ideology, something carried out of the hall with the ticket stub. He met me halfway with a buyer’s anecdote: after a Kia Seltos shoot, his boss saw the car on location, liked it for his family, and bought one. You cannot buy the bungalow from the movie, he said. True. But the dream, I said, you can take. Sau percent, he said. One hundred percent. And his last word on the divide was the audience’s own body: the same person watches the ad and watches the cinema, in the same chair, often in the same sitting, since the ad arrives uninvited in the middle of the stream anyway. One human, one emotion, one story economy. The industry draws the line. The viewer never has.
On the nineteenth of February 2020, on the fifth day of the Chennai schedule of Indian 2, Shankar’s film with Kamal Haasan at EVP Film City, a crane collapsed during preparation for an action sequence. It killed three crew members: Krishna, an assistant director, Chandran, an art assistant, and Madhu, a production assistant. Nine more were injured. Kamal Haasan and Shankar escaped by metres, and Shankar tweeted that he felt it would have been better had the crane fallen on him. Lyca Productions announced two crore rupees for the dead and injured, Kamal Haasan one crore from his own side, Shankar another crore.
Venkat was not on that film. One of the dead was his friend, a man he had worked with in Chennai.
His summary of the event refuses both melodrama and comfort. It was an accident, he said, not a placement; nobody told them to stand there and dropped a crane. And then the sentence that reframes every safety conversation I have heard.
आज रात सोएगा तो कल सुबह उठेगा, guarantee नहीं है।
Venkat Alexa, after speaking about his friend
Our life has also become digital, he said, meaning fragile, meaning version-dependent, and the joke was so dark and so exact that neither of us followed it anywhere.
The conclusion he drew from his friend’s death was structural, not sentimental, and it is the reason this section stands alone. Compensation cannot resurrect. What a union does, layered under whatever a production pays, what it did in his telling with its own lakhs in cases like this, is smaller and larger at once: it is the body that reaches your family’s door and makes inquiries. In Mumbai, he said, there is no such certainty; tum kaun ho, mujhe maloom nahi. In the south, the union arrives. That difference, between a death and a disappearance, is what the next section is actually about.
08 · The Fifth Day
Start with what is owed. Venkat once worked seventy-six days on a production that owed him two lakh seventy thousand rupees. Twelve years have passed. The money has not come, and it will not, because the company has dissolved into changed phone numbers and an unknown address. He told us this without theatre, as a line item, and then told us the rest: payments saved toward a double-bedroom house in Hyderabad, fifty-seven to seventy lakhs of intention, still pending against vanished payers. The nature of the work, I said, is that you are often forced to forgive and keep working, and he agreed that it is painful, and then did the thing he does, which is pivot from the wound to the system that treats it.
The system is the union, and his testimony about it is the most granular I have recorded on this show. South Indian unions are strong, he said, and the structure explains why: one union per state, Hyderabad one, Chennai one, Kerala one, Karnataka one, so that membership is consolidated and a technician travelling between southern states carries the same protection and the same production discipline with him. Mumbai, by contrast, fragments into eight or ten bodies along linguistic and political lines, and the protection thins accordingly. The Film Employees Federation of South India, the umbrella his world answers to, federates its member craft unions, twenty-three by some public accounts, twenty-four by others, and counts its members in the tens of thousands. Venkat’s own number is twenty-four, and he holds documentary evidence for it, which will arrive in the next section as a photocopy in a producer’s hand.
He defends the union and audits it in the same breath. Rates revise once in three years, ten or twelve percent at a time, three thousand becoming thirty-three hundred or thirty-four hundred, while the market’s prices, he pointed out, rise every day. The floor protects and the floor lags. He has worked under that lag for more than two decades and is about to negotiate against it as a producer, and he still said, unprompted: I am not telling you this as a producer. Unions are needed.
What does the union actually do? On his own production, Venkat says, the union called him on the fifth day of the schedule. Four days are done, clear the payments on the fifth. His answer, every five days I clear, call my staff on the sixth evening, and if they are not paid, stop my shoot on the seventh, is the answer of a man showing off the system working, and he was entitled to show off, because the system’s teeth are real: bills checked with the crew behind the producer’s back, a shoot-stop power on day seven, and, in the other direction, an information network. Three thousand members of a craft union sit in the same WhatsApp groups, and when a production house does not pay, the group knows by evening: be alert, this house is not paying. A blacklist travels at the speed of a forward. Kerala runs the same machinery on a seven-day cycle, bills on the seventh day, a call by the ninth.
And then there is Kerala beyond its payment cycle, which he described less as a geography than as a working condition, and which is the passage I have thought about most since the recording. Unity very very good, he said, no ego issues, and the superlatives came without hedging: the best technicians from Kerala, the best cinematographers, the best editors, friends of his still cutting big pictures to this day. Fourteen of his films are Malayalam. The detail that reorganised my understanding of the phrase working conditions is this one. On a forty-day schedule, even if your house is on the next street from the location, the production gives you a hotel room for the duration. You are all in my control, the production’s logic runs, and the surface reading is discipline. The deeper reading is the opposite of control. A technician who goes home every night carries home back to the set every morning, a quarrel, an unpaid bill, a mood sitting in the mind, and Venkat had already told us, in Section 05, exactly what a domestic quarrel does to a focus puller’s hands. Kerala productions, in his telling, simply remove the variable. They take responsibility for the technician’s mind, not only his wage. The camera arrives mounted at your room; you come down, stand, ready sir. Mammootty and Mohanlal films finish in thirty to fifty days on a single schedule. The local public supports cinema one hundred percent, locations open easily, the controllers’ pressure stays low, and a low-budget film shot this way can collect across India. If this essay has a spine, working conditions before trophies, this paragraph is what the spine looks like standing up. Not a slogan. A hotel room across the street from your own house, booked so that your mind arrives at work as protected as your wage.
Then I asked the National Award question, the one on the shoot card. Cinematography is recognised at the National Awards through the cinematographer’s name, but the image is not made by one person. His first answer defended the father: the DOP is the main head, handling lights, light technicians, generators, camera boys, gaffers, focus pullers, even coordinating with sound, and if the award reaches him it reaches the family, the way, he said, ten crores reaching a husband is also the wife’s share. I pushed once: when the image on screen is good, the sound engineer who held the tone is a good technician, the camera attendant who set the right internal resolution is a good technician, the gaffer is a good technician, and how many of them does anyone see? He absorbed it and re-balanced rather than retreated: when did I say the DOP is not important, but behind the DOP five people went, and all of them are important behind that image. It is the correct answer, and it is this show’s answer, reached from the other side of the camera.
And here the essay owes the reader a seam. The most quotable formulation in these episodes, working conditions before trophies, wages before applause, was not delivered by Venkat in a single speech. It was built across the recliner, and most of the bricks were mine. I was the one who laid the list out: is my money coming on time, is my working environment free of fear, do I have equipment, how much support do I have, from the crew, from the set, from the officials, how well am I able to work. Venkat assented, support hai toh, and then made the argument his own in the only register he fully trusts, the market’s. The technology failed, he said, so the focus puller has value. There is demand and there are not enough people, because fifty shots a day from morning to evening need an experienced hand, the experienced hand costs real money, and the patience that builds one has thinned. The thesis of this section is a joint construction: the interviewer articulating, the technician ratifying it and then re-pricing it. I am leaving the seam visible, because an essay about credit should not launder its own.
09 · The Producer Who Holds the Ledger
More than two decades after the rental-house owner told an apprentice that the new camera was his next life, the apprentice is producing a film. By the time we recorded, he had shot twenty-six or twenty-seven days, generated forty-eight terabytes of footage, and was two or three months from release, at which point, he said with a producer’s new modesty, he will finally learn what distribution is. The transition is the spine of the second episode, and what makes it worth an essay is that he is not transitioning away from his craft. He is weaponising it.
Watch what more than two decades of the second seat do to a production office. A new producer, in Venkat’s telling, is a man who gets a chair, a fan, coffee, biscuits and a quotation: a camera that rents for a certain price is offered to him at sixty thousand, because he does not know. Venkat knows. I know the per-day rent, he said, and you know the human value also. The phrase stopped me. Human value. He meant it literally, as a rate: what a technician’s day is actually worth, what this one is to be paid and what that one, and he knows it because he messaged the union as a producer and asked for the workers’ wage list, and the ledger of all twenty-four crafts came back to him. He takes the photocopy in hand and goes man by man. You are the sound engineer, your union rate is this much, what extra are you using, okay, done. There is no wastage money, he said. Whatever budget I planned, I will get it in that budget. The same union rate card that once protected him as a worker now disciplines him as a producer, and he submits to it from both directions at once, which may be the only genuinely new model of an ethical producer I have heard described on this show: not a man promising kindness, but a man who cannot be overcharged and will not underpay, because he has personally been every line of the ledger.
The craft knowledge runs through everything. He knows what a DOP shoots and what an editor keeps, so he can read a script in shots. He knows what the DI costs and which colorist’s filmography is worth the rate. He knows that one accurate camera booking saves a lakh of posturing. He tested the script the way he tests equipment: heard the subject, liked thirty percent, demanded the full screenplay, sat with it for three or four days scene by scene and dialogue by dialogue, and then ran the most honest focus group available to any producer, his wife and her parents and his own family, general audiences all, cross-checking whether it touched them. The on-location experience of twenty-plus years, he said, is being used here, and the audience will also understand. I believe him on the first claim and the industry will adjudicate the second in a few months.
What kind of producer will he refuse to become? He answered with the payment rhythm before anything else: pay perfectly, weekly, time to time, and the workers will not leave you. He has seen the other kind, the few who delay and torture, and he has been on the receiving end of them for a house’s worth of unpaid lakhs. He also answered with the thing producers never say on the record: the prevention is cheaper than the penance. Control the technicians’ budget through the union ledger and the budget controls itself, and the first copy releases inside the plan.
And then the conversation arrived where The Second Seat always arrives, at the chair beside the chair. Across this whole journey, I asked, the frustration and the strong days, who kept you motivated, who has been your second seat in life? Meri wife hai na, he said, before the question had fully landed. The arrangement he described is a division of focus: whatever problem comes, from her side of the family or his, she absorbs it, tum tumhara kaam dekh lo, trust, karo, main hoon, from the background. He sat with that for a second and then produced, unprompted, the line that gave the episode its heart.
I think she is my focus puller.
Venkat Alexa, on his wife
The room laughed and then went quiet in the same breath, because the metaphor is perfect in a way he had spent four hours teaching us to verify. The focus puller is the person who watches the distance so you can watch the performance. The one who absorbs the technical burden so the artist can stay in the zone. The first to know when something is going soft, and the one who corrects it with a glance, without stopping the take. He had described his wife’s job and his own job in the same sentence and they turned out to be the same job. The figure is an old one, the wife absorbing in the background so the man can work, but in his cosmology the focus puller is not the support act, it is the first to know and the hardest to replace, and he gave her the highest title he has.
His advice to the next generation came wrapped in a father’s bluntness: keep your principles, no daaru, no cards, no drugs, no wandering, finish the work and go straight home, and your family’s trust becomes your capacity, because a boy whose parents can say whatever you do, we support you, can do anything. Friends will test you for four or five years, he said, and then leave you alone once they learn ye aisa wala nahi hai. Seventy percent of the industry, by his own estimate, goes the other way, and he has watched it happen beside him. After forty, he added, BP and sugar come free anyway. The room laughed again. The advice stands.
At the end, we asked him to sign the show’s reel, to leave whatever the conversation or the life had taught him. He wrote one line.
Believe your family. They will give the second seat.
Venkat Alexa, signed on the reel
Coda · What Is Sharp and What Is Blur
Every episode of this show is built on one structural idea: cinema does not become legible from a single seat. You have to go sit beside the person who was closest to the part of it you want to understand. With Venkat Alexa, the part was the image itself, the literal sharpness of everything Indian audiences have watched for more than two decades, held steady through smoke and borders and bears and unpaid invoices by a man counting feet.
The conversation kept returning to a single physical fact, and I want to end on it because it is also a moral fact. Focus cannot be fixed in post. Colour can. Framing can. Sound can be dubbed, performances can be trimmed, whole subplots can be saved on the editing table. Focus is the one element of the image that exists only in the present tense, decided irreversibly in the moment of its making, by a person whose name the credits compress into a line nobody reads. Everything this show believes is contained in that asymmetry. The industry’s memory, like its post-production, is endlessly correctable. The work itself happened once, live, on location, and was either held sharp or lost.
The conversation about artificial intelligence belongs here, against that asymmetry, because that is where it kept pointing anyway. I quoted Javed Akhtar’s argument about writers: bring all the AI you want, it cannot match a poem, because it has never had its heart broken, never sat before a guru, never been corrected, never faced rejection, never cried, never felt the first joy of getting something right, and all of that human feeling is what enters craft. Venkat accepted the point and refused its comfort in the same breath. You are correct, madam, he said, but if that technology comes, the form will change. And where my argument was lyrical, his prediction was concrete. You will need to transform, from focus puller to camera, toward the operator’s and the cinematographer’s work. That work will be available. This focus puller’s work will not. He has watched autofocus fail on every set it has visited, and he is still not betting his successors’ careers on its failure. It was the least romantic sentence in four hours of recording, and it came from the man with the most to lose by saying it, delivered with the same steadiness as his answer to the Alexa in 2010: when the next machine comes, be the first person who learns it.
P. Venkateshwara Rao held the present tense sharp for more than two decades, across five languages, eight-hundred-odd commercials and a filmography that runs from Thuppakki to Pathemari to a fog-soaked village a hundred metres from the fence. The industry paid him the strangest compliment it had available: it gave him the machine’s name, because the machine was the biggest thing it had recently learned to trust, and he was the man who taught it the machine. Now he is producing, with the union’s rate card in one hand and two decades and more of human value in the other, and the most interesting question in Indian cinema this season is a small one. When the first copy of his film releases, somewhere in it there will be a shot where the focus does something quiet and exact, and almost no one watching is going to know why it feels right.
We will.
Episode 02
Ramanuj, Before Anuj — Anuj Sharma
A companion essay to the two episodes recorded with Anuj Sharma — Padma Shri, actor, UNICEF Celebrity Advocate, singer, MLA Dharsiwa.
Watch Part 1 on YouTube
Watch Part 2 on YouTube
The chair next to him on our set was empty. That is the whole premise of The Second Seat. There is the guest's chair, and there is the chair beside it, kept open for the person who shaped them. The absence is the point. When I asked Anuj Sharma who occupies that seat in his life, he did not pause.
The Sunday Times had put him in the same paragraph as MGR, NTR, and Mohanlal on the list it calls Kings of the Provinces. He had landed in Hyderabad for the first time in his life that morning. None of that came out in the answer. His mother did.
We recorded four hours that day and cut them into two episodes. The first I framed around the janpratinidhi, the elected representative who acts, writes, sings, and directs as a parallel life. The second I framed around something simpler. Apna aadmi, not superstar. The man before the title.
What follows here is the third frame, the one that could not sit inside either episode. The research that walked beside me into the studio and walked back out with me. The questions I held in reserve because they belonged to the page, not the camera.
To take Anuj Sharma seriously is to refuse the easy framings. He is not the unsung hero from a small place. He is not the Bollywood reject who built his own kingdom. The celebrity politician tag fits him even less. He is something more specific and more interesting. He is a man who decided, deliberately and early, that the seat beside him would always be filled before the seat in front of him. The whole shape of his life follows from that decision.
Bhatapara, 1965 to 2000
Bhatapara is a small kasba in Raipur district. Most of India does not know it exists. It enters this story twice, and the second time it enters louder than the first.
In April 1965, the first Chhattisgarhi film, Kahi Debe Sandesh, was released in Durg and Bhatapara. Raipur came months later, after the controversy had cooled. The film was about an inter-caste love between a Scheduled Caste boy and a Brahmin girl. Brahmin groups had demanded a ban. There were threats to torch theatres on fire. The film was rescued from suppression by Indira Gandhi, who watched it and said it promoted national integration.
The first time Chhattisgarhi cinema appeared on a screen, it appeared as a caste question, and it appeared first in a town that most of India had never heard of. Mohammad Rafi had sung for it. The national voice walked into the regional language early. Then Chhattisgarhi cinema went almost completely quiet for the next three decades. Two films between 1965 and 2000.
Eleven years after Kahi Debe Sandesh, in May 1976, Ramanuj Sharma was born in that town.
When his debut film, Mor Chhaihan Bhuiyan, released on the twenty-seventh of October, 2000, exactly five days before Chhattisgarh became the country's twenty-sixth state, it walked into an almost empty room. The room had been emptied by an entire ecosystem that had decided Chhattisgarhi cinema was un-viable commercially and un-serious culturally.
The film opened with three prints, in Raipur, Durg, and Bilaspur. Demand pushed the producer to add twelve more after release. Distributors had refused before release, because nobody trusted a Chhattisgarhi film to run. Twenty scenes and a song were cut during the shoot itself because the budget did not stretch. The director's brother, Tinkoo, sang playback because a singer could not be afforded. Transporters in surrounding villages made small economies out of ferrying audiences to the nearest theatre. The film ran in one cinema hall for twenty-seven consecutive weeks.
Anuj at that point had a marketing job at Godrej. He took twenty days of leave to shoot the film. He arrived at his own premiere half an hour late. The hall was already dark. The film was already running. He found a seat at the back. When his on-screen entry happened a few minutes later, the theatre roared. He thought he had done something wrong on screen.
He left the theatre as a different category of person from the one who had walked in.
He drew the geography of Chhattisgarh for me without prompting on tape. Three regions, three colours.
He did not say it like a tour guide. He said it like a man who has memorised the mineral logic of his state and knows it cannot be separated from its cinematic logic. The white belt was where the theatres clustered. The black and red belts watched their cinema mostly on cable, on VCDs, later on phones.
What he couldn't see
He grew up hearing the songs but not seeing the films. Kahi Debe Sandes had a Rafi number that played on Akashvani. His father kept the radio on, and Lakshman Masturiya and Kavita Vasnik and Kedar Yadav came through the speaker in the kitchen. The films themselves were rumours. Prints had faded, reels were misplaced, the negative of Ghar Dwar developed problems. Decades later, when subtitles arrived as the new technology of regional access, Chhattisgarhi films still didn't get them. Even when the print survived, the language didn't.
Kahi Debe Sandes turned up on YouTube in 2020, uploaded by a channel called Jay Johar Chhattisgarh. Ghar Dwar is harder. There is no Chhattisgarh archive. There is no restored print. The state, twenty-five years into its own existence, has just laid the foundation stone for a 150 crore film city in Mana-Tuta, but hardly any parallel program for the foundational films that gave the language its industry.
What he has, instead, is the band, Aarug. Untouched, sacred, pure, the water offered before anyone drinks. He started it to bring back songs that had stopped being sung. Today, Aarug Music is the label that releases his films. The same instrument that rescues the old songs is publishing the new ones. One man, one band, doing what an archive would do. When he received the Padma Shri and made his three calls, this was the logic underneath. He was calling the people whose work he had inherited as rumour, before his own work could be rumoured back to them.
The three phone calls
In 2014, when the Padma Shri was announced for Art, Chhattisgarh, officially listed as Shri Anuj (Ramanuj) Sharma, he made three phone calls.
The first was to Manu Nayak, the man who made Kahi Debe Sandesh in 1965. The second call was to Satish Jain, the director who cast him without a screen test, after a single conversation about how to roll up a sleeve. The third call was to Laxman Masturiya, the poet and lyricist whose Chhattisgarhi songs Anuj had been singing since he was a child.
Most actors who win the Padma Shri call producers, publicists, stars. Anuj called his teachers. He called the road, not the destination. He called the men who would later be invisible in the public memory of his arrival.
There is a quieter detail underneath that I almost missed. Manu Nayak was born in a village called Kurra. Kurra falls inside the Dharsiwa Vidhan Sabha constituency. Anuj has been the MLA from Dharsiwa since December 2023. The distance between the man who made the first Chhattisgarhi film and the man who became its first popular face is one village inside the same electoral seat.
He named other teachers in passing too. Rahul Singh. Bhupendra Sharma. K.D. Diwan. People who do not appear on Padma Shri citations.
He told a small story about a spotboy on the set of Maya De De Maya Le Le who walked up to him with water before a fight scene and quietly suggested that he land the punch first and then dust his hands. He listened. The take changed because the spotboy had said so.
Maya, and the voice
He told me on tape that his life has three priorities, in this order. Family. Cinema. Politics. He repeated it twice because he wanted me to hear that the order was deliberate.
His cinema does something rare in the Indian regional landscape. It refuses the vocabulary of pyaar. Look at his titles. Maya. Mayaa De De Mayaa Le Le. Maya De De. Mayaru Maar Dare Maya Ma. The word that keeps returning is not love. It is maya.
The word maya in Chhattisgarhi does not mean what Hindi cinema thinks it means. It is not illusion in the spiritual sense. It is attachment. The bond that ties a person to soil, parent, partner, child, neighbour, language. It is the glue of relation. It is the part of an emotional life that is communal before it is individual. If you wanted one word for the operating system of his cinema, it is that word. Not pyaar, which is a private feeling between two people. Maya, which is a public thread between many.
This is why his films climax with return rather than rebellion. The son stays for the mother instead of running to the city. The lover wins the family before he wins the bride. The hero comes back to the village with reputation rather than abandoning it.
Pressed in the conversation, he gives his sharpest formulation. The dialogue from Suhaag that, in his own telling, made him say yes to the film. Chhattisgarhiya mann ke pyaar na, maya hote hain. Dhai akshar ke nahin, do akshar ke hote hain. Yahaa adha-adhura kuch nahin. Sab poora-poora. The frame is Kabir; dhai akshar prem ka, padhe so pandit hoye, but the move is to invert it. Hindi's pyaar contains a half-formed consonant, the प्या conjunct, which is why poets call it two-and-a-half. Maya has no half. Two full letters, poora-poora. The script itself is the argument: Chhattisgarhi affection has no half-forms baked in. It either is or it isn't. Two letters of completeness against two-and-a-half of incompleteness.
He was a singer before he was an actor. He has said this clearly. Music to mera pehla pyaar hai. His biggest video is not from any of his films. It is a Devi Jas Geet called Aarug Kalsa, released through his own music label, which he named after his younger daughter, Aarug. Roughly forty-one million views. The biggest screen of his career, by audience size, is a phone. And what is playing on that phone is not a romance from his prime decade. It is a devotional folk song he sings himself, in a Chhattisgarhi tradition older than the medium that now hosts it.
He refused to dismiss any genre. He said music is a river. If you stop it, it spoils. If you let it run, it corrects itself. Coming from a man who is the most distinctly Chhattisgarhi voice on his state's cinema, that open-handedness is worth marking. Purists do not actually run popular cultures. People who keep a window open do.
The second seat itself
His wife Smita is an Assistant Professor of English. She watches more films than he does. They have a recurring argument about this. Aap film dekhne nahi jaate. She has stopped waiting for him. She goes with the children, or her siblings, or her friends.
When he is testing a story or a cut, he asks her to watch with him, and he watches her watching. Her face tells him what is working and what is not. This is one definition of a second seat. The chair that holds the audience you trust before you trust the public.
I want to say something honest here, because the woman in his life and the woman on his screen are not yet the same conversation. Across twenty-five years of films, Chhattisgarhi women have appeared in his cinema as mothers, daughters, partners, anchors of family duty. They have been the moral memory of the household. They have rarely been the centre of their own interior weather.
Separation of roles is one kind of respect. Granting interiority is another. The second is harder to write. It is also the next horizon.
The MLA file
He is, since December 2023, the BJP MLA from Dharsiwa. He won by 44,343 votes. His attendance in the Chhattisgarh Vidhan Sabha is hundred per cent. He has asked one hundred and thirteen questions on the floor in this term. They are not vanity questions. They are about illegal plotting in his constituency, about CSR fund expenditure, about pollution, about education, about labour conditions.
There is a word that runs through both his cinema and his legislative work. Zameen. In the films, zameen is the soil of belonging. The earth that holds the child, the village, the mother's stove, the lover's footprint. In the Assembly, zameen is paperwork. A revenue record. A disputed boundary. An encroachment file. The same word does two different kinds of work. He has had to learn to live inside both.
Chitrotpala Film City is being built in Naya Raipur on roughly ninety-five acres, with a state commitment of about a hundred and fifty crore rupees. International film trade press has already covered the project as Chhattisgarh's bid to diversify Indian production geography beyond Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Chennai.
And there is a structural absence on the other side that money cannot fix. Chhattisgarhi is not in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. It is, officially, a dialect of Hindi. There are roughly one and a half crore people who speak Chhattisgarhi as a first language. When a bureaucracy collapses a language into a dialect, cinema becomes the unofficial parliament of that language's public dignity.
Teejan Bai is also from here
She is from Ganiyari, near Bhilai. Pardhi Scheduled Tribe. Padma Shri in 1988, Padma Bhushan in 2003, Padma Vibhushan in 2019. She is the woman who broke the seated Vedamati style of Pandavani and performed Kapalik on her feet, improvising as she went, in a form that until then men had owned.
I am not naming her to subtract anything from Anuj Sharma. I am naming her because the cultural ecosystem he comes from has more than one ancestor, and one of them is a tribal woman from Bhilai who broke a hierarchy by standing up. Any honest map of Chhattisgarhi performance has to include her.
Cinema and Pandavani are not in competition. They are in conversation. And the conversation only becomes audible when both sides are visible on the page.
The arithmetic
He has been, by his own count, three things across three decades. Performer first, civic figure second, party worker third. He insists that each be evaluated separately, by the standards of its own form.
I asked him what makes a superstar. He did not list awards.
The metric is mirror, not throne. The film as a place where a person sees a version of themselves they had not seen before in their own language.
I asked him, near the end, why he had never moved to Bombay.
The chair next to him on our set was empty because that is the show. The chair next to him in his life is full because that is the man. He came to Hyderabad for the first time in his life because we asked. He recorded for four hours in one morning, talked about his mother and his wife and his teachers and the spotboy and the lightman without losing the rhythm of a man who knows he is on camera, then left.
Two episodes carry that morning in different costumes. Janpratinidhi in one. Apna aadmi in the other. This essay is the seam between them, the thread that runs along the underside of both.
Somewhere on the way back to Raipur, between airports, he probably looked up at the seat next to him. I hope it was full.
Episode 01
"I Love Lights" — C. Raja Krishnan
Rajinikanth, Dharavi, and French cinema. Twenty-seven years as a gaffer.
Watch on YouTube
I'll be honest about why this conversation took the shape it did.
I did not know what it costs to do this work well, or what it means to do it politically. Those are different kinds of knowing and the gap between them is where this episode lives.
C. Raja Krishnan has lit twenty-seven years of Indian cinema across six languages. He lit Madras, Kabali, Kaala, Sarpatta Parambarai. He has never spoken publicly about any of it. That fact is not unusual in this industry. It tells you something about how we have decided to understand cinema, which is to say, through the people whose names appear largest on the poster.
I am not going to make a case for how underappreciated his work is. That framing bores me and it would bore him. What I want to do instead is put down the things I thought before we spoke, because they changed how I watched the conversation, and they might change how you watch it too.
The shorthand is that the gaffer executes the DOP's vision. The DOP says what the light should feel like and the gaffer makes it happen. This is true the way a lot of shorthands are true, which is accurate at the surface and wrong underneath.
A DOP works in the language of intention. This scene should feel like 3am. This character should look like someone carrying something they can't put down. That is not a technical specification. It is a creative problem handed to someone else to solve. The gaffer reads that problem and answers it in electricity and physics, in real time, before the camera rolls.
When Raja Krishnan reads a script, he is not looking for equipment lists. He is looking for a word. Lonely. Suffocating. Safe. That word is the brief. Everything else follows from it.
Whether that constitutes authorship is a question the industry has no framework to answer, because authorship in cinema gets assigned upward, to the director, and everything below that becomes execution by definition. I think that framework is wrong. Arguing about credit is the least interesting version of this conversation, so I will leave it there.
I had not thought carefully about how many departments make lighting decisions without realising they are making lighting decisions.
A production designer builds a set in specific colours with specific textures. Those choices determine how light will behave before a single lamp is switched on. A costume designer chooses silk or sequins. Both scatter light in ways that can reshape a shot. A makeup artist applies foundation that changes how reflective a face is. Each of these is a lighting decision made without the gaffer in the room.
The gaffer inherits all of it. When the art department's palette and the lighting plan pull against each other, someone has to give ground. That happens on set, in the minutes before a shot, and the audience sees nothing of it. They see the result of a negotiation they were never told was happening.
The editing connection is less obvious. Light that works for one camera angle only lands cleanly when cut from one specific other angle. A gaffer thinking about the edit is doing different work than one who isn't. There is a test I find useful: remove all the dialogue from a scene. What remains, the feeling in the room, the relationship between the figures, what seems to be about to happen, is what the light was actually saying.
Hollywood's lighting grammar was built for a specific face. High cheekbones, pale skin, a particular bone structure. The placement of key lights, the fill ratios, the diffusion choices, all of it was calibrated around that face. Most of the world does not have that face.
Indian cinema inherited this grammar and has used it, largely without examining it, ever since. The practical result is that darker skin tones are routinely over-filled, flooded with additional light to push them toward a standard that was written for someone else. This is common practice. It is also almost never discussed as a choice, because a grammar that goes unexamined stops looking like a choice and starts looking like the way things are.
In Hollywood, Bradford Young and others have said this clearly in public. In Indian cinema, the conversation barely exists, while the practice plays out on Indian sets every day.
What changes on a Ranjith set is that the political question becomes explicit. His films are arguments about who deserves to be seen and in what light. The gaffer on those films is not just executing a visual style. He is inside an argument, and he knows it.
Murali G taught Raja Krishnan to find the light that is already true in a space rather than impose the light you prefer. You don't manipulate. You articulate. The light that belongs to a street, to a room, to a specific hour, that is your starting point. You make it visible. You don't replace it.
What made this education unusual is that it didn't happen at a distance. Murali G was the cinematographer on the same set, in the same room. Learning happened through proximity rather than instruction. You watch someone make decisions in real time and you understand, slowly, why.
Santosh Sivan offered a different lesson. Everything with mystery should have a blend of darkness and light. If you are playing a piano, you should play with all the keys. Where Murali G teaches restraint, Sivan teaches range. Use what's there. Use all of it.
Most films ask a gaffer to lean one way. Ranjith's films require both in the same frame. Dharavi has to look like Dharavi, specific and real and dense. Rajinikanth in Dharavi has to look like a myth. Those are not the same visual demand. Finding where they meet, in actual light, is the specific problem Raja Krishnan spent three films solving.
On Madras, after the shoot was complete, Murali G desaturated the heroine's face in post. The intention was to remove the cosmetic brightness that conventional star treatment would give her, to make her look like she belongs to her community rather than arriving in it from outside. It was the right call for the film. I don't have a tidy conclusion about what that kind of decision means, the quiet ones made after the set has gone dark. I just think it's worth sitting with.
A father telling his son he has six months to live. A one-room house in North Chennai. Two in the afternoon.
Two in the afternoon is the whole problem. It is the most indifferent light there is. Flat, harsh, no agenda. It does not know what is being said in the room. The cruelty of the scene and the indifference of the hour exist together, and the light's job is not to soften that gap but to stay inside it.
You don't bring in softboxes. You find the one angle where the window's light crosses the father's face in a way that feels witnessed rather than staged. You are not making it easier to look at. You are making it true.
The reason I keep returning to this scene is that it clarifies something about what the work actually demands. The temptation is always to make a scene easier to be inside. The discipline is to resist that, and to stay with what the scene actually is.
Tamil cinema's relationship with Rajinikanth is theological. The light finds him when he enters a frame. It separates him from everything around him. This is not purely aesthetic. It is a claim about what kind of being he is.
Kaala argues that the communities his character comes from deserve equal dignity. Star lighting argues that this face matters more than the faces around it. Those are contradictory propositions and they have to coexist in the same frame.
The colour brief made it concrete. Black means power, white means oppression. The inversion of Tamil cinema's default. The technical problem followed immediately. Black absorbs light. It doesn't give it back. Making Rajinikanth's black powerful rather than shadowy required the entire rig to be suspended from the ceiling of a locked Dharavi-replica set in Mumbai, with no floor or wall positions available. The problem the film's politics set was a problem the light department had to physically solve.
Raja Krishnan grew up in the world that made Rajinikanth into what he is. The cardboard cutouts, the mass worship, the weight of what that face means to a specific community. He has spent hundreds of hours in the same room as the man. When I asked him about it, what he said stayed with me. Not because it resolved anything, but because it didn't try to.
Sarpatta is set in 1975 North Madras. The light of that world has a specific character. Sodium vapour streetlamps, tungsten bulbs, fluorescent tubes. Warm, orange, slightly degraded. It makes skin look humid. It belongs to working-class Tamil streets over decades.
Indian cities are replacing sodium vapour with white LED. The spectral signature is different. The warmth is not there in the same way. A filmmaker who wants to recreate that light in twenty years will not have living streets to reference. Only photographs and the fading recall of people who were actually in those streets.
I don't think this is a small loss.
Scorsese and Gordon Willis used the sodium vapour of 1970s New York in Taxi Driver not as a period detail but as an active choice. A light that makes skin look feverish. They built that quality into the film deliberately. Sarpatta had to do the equivalent, find what was true about the light of 1975 North Madras and use it rather than fight it. That work gets harder every year as the reference disappears from the real world.
The technology shift compounds this. Indian cinema has moved from tungsten rigs to programmable LED. Sixteen million colour combinations, controlled from a phone. The question is not whether LED is better. The question is whether infinite control is the same thing as freedom, or whether the constraint of tungsten was itself doing creative work. Tungsten was hot, directional, physical. It behaved like fire. LED is cool and obedient. When you can produce any light you want, deciding what light you want becomes its own kind of difficulty.
Film sets are romanticised. Light departments are not. Heights, heavy equipment moved by hand, night schedules, outdoor conditions. The work is physically punishing in ways that Indian labour law has no adequate language for.
During the production of Sarpatta, two workers died when an industrial crane was moved on set. The shoot continued. Safety officers were called and the work went on. I am not going to make a political argument out of a sentence. I will just say it plainly.
Two people died making a film about the dignity of working people.
Women are significantly underrepresented in the light departments of Tamil and Telugu cinema. The gaffer role in particular has seen very few women come through it, and the ones who have tend to remain exceptions rather than the beginning of something wider. Hetal Dedhia has worked as a gaffer in Indian film for over twenty years and remains the most visible example of what that looks like.
The explanation that circulates is physical demand. Night shoots, heavy equipment, outdoor conditions. I understand why this explanation is offered and I don't fully accept it, because physical demand doesn't by itself produce near-total absence. That requires a system that never creates an entry point.
The gaffer's department recruits personally. You hire people you know. There is no audition, no formal process. The structure was built without women in it and it reproduces that fact without anyone having to make a decision to do so. No one has to say no. The question never gets asked.
Raja Krishnan pushed back on the idea that the department looks down on the people inside it. The people in his crew are called light officers, not light boys, and that distinction matters to him. The culture on his sets is not one of hierarchy within the department. The absence of women is not, in his telling, a product of how the department sees itself. Which makes the question harder, not easier. A department that respects its own people and still has no women in it is a department whose exclusion runs deeper than attitude.
Raja Krishnan's work across Ranjith's films is an argument, made in light, that the people Indian cinema has historically kept at the margins deserve to be seen clearly and with dignity. The question of who gets to stand behind that light and make it is one I put to him directly. It is not a comfortable question and he did not treat it as one.
Film Analysis
Long-form criticism on how a film is made and what it says, going beyond box office narratives.
Deccan Herald · 19 June 2026
Sharpness is a Person
Two decades behind the lens, the focus puller they call Venkat Alexa knows exactly what the format frenzy is buying.
This week, grown adults waited in hour-long online queues, watched ticketing websites crash, and then watched scalpers list movie tickets for up to 1,500 dollars. Not concert tickets. Movie tickets, for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which releases on July 17 and is being promoted as the first feature shot entirely with IMAX film cameras.
The studio even published the trailer in the film’s different theatrical formats, so that fans could toggle between the full-height 1.43:1 IMAX frame and the wider ratios of ordinary screens, studying how much image each ticket buys. On June 8, Indian fans join the queue.
Read that again. The star of all this anticipation is not Matt Damon. It is a negative space, the extra image above and below the letterbox. We have entered the era in which the format is the celebrity.
India is not watching this from the balcony. Kalki 2898 AD was the first Indian film shot on the ARRI Alexa 65, the giant large-format camera available through ARRI’s rental ecosystem rather than normal sale. The same arms race has its first Indian beachhead. The question is what, exactly, the race is for.
I recently spent four hours with a man unusually qualified to answer. P. Venkateshwara Rao has spent more than two decades as a focus puller, the technician responsible for keeping the moving image sharp at the exact distance the lens demands, across five languages, on films from Thuppakki to Kaali Khuhi, and the industry long ago renamed him after the machine he mastered first. They call him Venkat Alexa. He recalls the Alexa’s raw workflow arriving in Hindi cinema on Vishal Bhardwaj’s Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola, and these days he is on the other side of the ledger too, producing his first feature. On The Second Seat, he gave the cleanest account of the resolution mania I have heard, using a fly. “Shoot the fly in HD and there is a fly there. Shoot it at 4K and above and you get the wing movement, the eyes.”
His example was Eega, Rajamouli’s housefly revenge saga. Resolution, in other words, buys life. But listen to where the life actually goes. Higher resolution, he explains, means more forgiveness afterwards. Colour can be regraded, frames can be re-cut, the DI suite can rescue more than audiences imagine. A minute of HD footage weighs about three gigabytes. A minute of modern uncompressed raw can weigh ten times that, depending on camera and format. The arms race is, at bottom, an insurance race. We are buying the right to fix things later.
Except for one thing. One element of the cinematic image has stayed beyond post-production’s reach, and it happens to be the element the entire IMAX frenzy is unknowingly worshipping. Focus.
Venkat’s authority on this point was earned the unforgiving way. A focus puller’s mistakes screen in public, at forty feet wide. A focus puller stands beside the lens counting distances, five feet, seven feet, six, while a star performs, and turns a ring so that the sharp plane and the moving face never disagree. Get it wrong once and the take dies, the mood dies with it, and a hundred people turn around. Consider his favourite thought experiment. An art director builds a ten-crore set. The cinematographer opens the lens fully, and the background dissolves into blur. Ten crores, gone soft. Who knows first? The focus puller knows.
Perhaps that is why production does not feel like a departure for him so much as a wider form of the same vigilance. The focus puller asks what must stay sharp in the shot. The producer asks what must stay sharp in the film.
Surely a machine does this now? Not reliably. Autofocus cinema systems exist, including trackers tucked into an actor’s pocket, and in Venkat’s experience they fail the moment anyone crosses the frame, racking faithfully to the interruption. The technology remains rare even in Hollywood, he says, and the dozens of Indian films that release in any given week are still focused overwhelmingly by hand. Nolan shot over two million feet of IMAX film for The Odyssey. Across that mountain of film, sharpness still had to be protected live, by people who could not simply undo a missed plane of focus later.
This is the irony hiding inside the ticket queue. The AI debate in Indian cinema has so far been fought in the future tense, over crews that might be replaced and endings that can now be rewritten, as Raanjhanaa’s was last year over its makers’ objections. But cinema has already run a long automation trial, decades of it, on the most basic optical decision in the frame, and the machine has yet to displace the hand at the top of the craft. The future panic and the format frenzy turn out to be the same question read in two directions. How much of the image is machine, and how much is hand? And still the craftsman refuses easy comfort. When the technology works, Venkat said flatly, the form will change, and the focus puller will have to become the camera. He has watched machines fail and bets on them anyway.
So go ahead, book the biggest screen. Just know what your money is buying. The resolution belongs to the format. The sharpness belongs to a person.
Original Source
Millennium Post · 24 May 2026
The Cinema of ‘Apnapan’
In Anuj Sharma’s Chhattisgarhi films, dialect is not merely speech. It is memory and belonging
About a week after Anuj Sharma turned 50, I found myself thinking not of his filmography first, but of his two names.
He carries one piece of paper on which both appear. Ramanuj, the name his mother spoke into him in Bhatapara. Anuj, the name a marketing boss at ‘Godrej’, preferred. Between them lie three decades of a single life. The Padma Shri certificate of 2014 is the only document on which the state agreed that both names belonged to the same man.
That detail stayed with me because Anuj’s cinema too stands between names. Between dialect and language. Between local memory and public recognition. Between what a file calls regional and what an audience calls its own.
In the conversation we recorded for ‘The Second Seat’, Anuj described Chhattisgarh not by district but by colour. Black in the north, where the coal sits. White in the centre, where the limestone is. Red in the south, in Bastar, where iron ore runs under Bailadila’s hills. The cinema halls are mostly in the white belt.
The black and red belts have very few. The old Bastar region, larger than Kerala before it was administratively broken up, once had three. What the map calls one state, the ear knows as many countries as possible. I asked him what happens when Chhattisgarhi arrives on screen. He used a word no constitutional schedule can fully hold, ‘apnapan’. The feeling that something is yours.
In his films, dialect is not merely speech. It is an address. It is the rhythm of teasing, blessing, flirting, scolding and grieving. A love story stops being only a love story when it speaks in the cadence of your courtyard, your wedding song, your neighbour’s joke and your mother’s half-said sentence. The plot may be familiar. The emotion may be old. But the address changes everything.
That address matters because India often discusses regional cinema through market size, subtitles, release counts and industry labels. But for the first audience of such a film, the achievement is more intimate. It is not only that they understand the words. It is the words that understand them. The joke arrives without explanation. Sorrow does not need cultural footnotes. The people on screen are recognisable as kin, neighbours, rivals, elders, lovers, fools and witnesses. Regional cinema allows people to recognise themselves without translation.
But in Anuj’s imagination, belonging is not a border. He believes a time will come when these boundaries will cease; when people will watch cinema from everywhere, regardless of the language belt it comes from.
A film must first belong somewhere before it can travel anywhere. ‘Apnapan’ is not the opposite of universality. It is where universality begins.
Original Source
Millennium Post · 20 March 2026
Thaai Kizhavi: She Gave Them the Gold. Not the Game
A dying moneylender becomes the center of a village’s greed. Beneath the scramble for gold lies a quieter story
The entire village waits for an old woman to die. Her sons are already dividing the gold. Their wives have sold their own ornaments to fund the search. A man in white shows up claiming to know exactly how much she has hidden. A doctor is flown in from the city, not to treat her, but to decode her unconscious hand gestures like they're a treasure map.
And Pavunithaayi, the aged moneylender at the heart of 'Thaai Kizhavi', just lies there. Saying nothing. Then she wakes up. And she gives them an answer so small, so ordinary, that you almost miss what just happened. Watch her face when she says it. Because the film then quietly shows you what she actually knew and for how long. She was never the object of this story. She was running it.
The detail that got me most wasn't gold. It was the 'pallanguzhi'. She mentions, almost in passing, that she learned the game after marriage, handed to her like a household chore. But she looked at this little game of distributing seeds across pits, of knowing when to hold and when to collect and she taught herself how money works. Nobody showed her. She figured it out from what little she was given.
That's who she is. Someone who builds a philosophy inside the constraints of her own life and tells no one. There's a glass cold drink bottle on a hill near the village. Hers. She'd been going there alone, probably for years, to a place that looked oddly like a deity, maybe because it was. The bottle is a city thing, out of place in a rural landscape, which means she was carrying both worlds up that hill quietly, by herself. Nobody knew she had gone or even thought about asking. The bottle is the only evidence.
When she finally distributes her gold to the women of the village, it feels like a victory. She says she was free at 60, she hopes her daughter will be free sooner and she dreams of women born free. It's a beautiful speech. But then the women wear the gold to a wedding and something in you sinks a little. She gave them the capital. Not the game.
The film knows this. It ends with Pavunithaayi smiling at the top of the frame, a monkey eating the god's food above her, the same gentle chaos carrying on as always. Nothing is resolved or ruined. She gave what she could, knowing it wasn't enough and smiled anyway.
Original Source
Millennium Post · 10 March 2026
The Week India Accidentally Programmed a Film Festival
In contemporary India, the difference between history and mythology is packaging
India's news cycle accidentally programmed a film festival with four releases, each in a different genre.
The men's T20 final arrived as a blockbuster — India 255/5, New Zealand 159, a 96-run win that played less like a match and more like a coronation. Sanju Samson's 89 and Bumrah's 4/15 functioned like star turns to be cut into a trailer.
Cut to: 'IndiGo' releasing a social media film announcing that over 1,000 of their pilots are now women. 17-and-a-half per cent of the workforce. In India, milestones rarely travel as numbers. They travel as edited stories.
Cut to: Hyderabad. The Indian women's hockey team beat Uruguay 4–0 in the FIH World Cup qualifiers. Sunelita Toppo scored. Then Ishika. Then Lalremsiami. Names that should be spoken like dialogue. Dialogue is how audiences learn to remember. Yet the qualifier was an under-distributed indie that played to an empty house.
Cut to: The Reserve Bank of India, the following morning, launching 'Digital Payment Awareness Week' with a single, quiet line. To receive money, you never need to scan a QR code or enter a PIN. Minimalist scriptwriting. A disclaimer dressed as a civic announcement.
The stories are not unequal in importance. They are unequal in packaging. In contemporary India, packaging is the difference between what enters national memory and what does not.
The T20 win arrived pre-edited. The narrative arc with India losing to New Zealand in 2019, losing again in 2021, winning in 2023, dominating in 2026 is loss, loss, revenge, dominance. A screenwriter encountering this material would call it scaffolding. It has pre-built tension, pre-existing audience investment and outcomes already inscribed in collective memory before a single frame is shot.
Kabir Khan's '83' (2021) understood this perfectly. A match becomes myth not when it is played, but when it is replayed. Cinema manufactures definitive replay.
Cricket became India's national religion because every stage of the loop was deliberately built. The camera language is already there. The power-play as montage, the star bowler as an inevitable plot device and the stadium as a cathedral. It was padded with training pipelines, the IPL, broadcast rights, endorsement ecosystems and then cinema, converting the whole apparatus into mythology, feeding the aspiration of the next generation. The pipeline preceded the passion. The passion felt inevitable only in retrospect.
'Chak De! India' (2007) demonstrates how cinema manufactures that memory. The final sequence begins with long shots that render the team as anonymous figures in a hostile stadium, then moves into tight close-ups before each penalty stroke, granting every player a brief moment of narrative subjectivity.
Sjoerd Marijne returned to coach the Indian women's team in 2026. Public conversation instinctively reached for 'Chak De! India' as the explanatory frame. Marijne's documented address to the 2026 squad was blunt and tactical: "I know you can score one or two goals every match. You need to score more." The 'sattar' minute speech will be quoted for another decade. Marijne's actual words won't be cited anywhere.
IndiGo's 17.5 per cent is also the product of a pipeline. Low-cost aviation created institutional demand at a scale that outpaced older gatekeeping logic. The achievement preceded any cinematic attention by years. This is the sharper point. The women already in those cockpits didn't require mythology to get there.
Cinema knows how to eroticise infrastructure when it wants to. A railway platform becomes an original story. A cockpit pipeline remains a statistic. 'Chak De! India' proved in 2007 that the machinery works. The question for Indian cinema isn't whether it can tell these stories. It is whether the industry will engage before it finds itself, as it does right now, reaching for a 19-year-old screenplay to explain a real team that is already, quietly, ahead of the fiction.
Meanwhile, the infrastructure continues quietly, like a background score that few audiences consciously notice. Planes depart. Payments clear. Qualifiers are played. The spectacle will come later, because a match becomes history when it is played. It becomes mythology only when someone decides it is worth replaying.
Original Source
Millennium Post · 1 March 2026
Assi: Counting Without Looking
Violence is not merely committed. It’s administratively managed through selective sight
"I was stupid." The first person who taught Parima how to see the world wasn't the state. It was her mother.
The lesson was simple: never step out without a man. This isn't cruelty, it's inheritance. She wasn't taught how to be safe. She was taught how to blame herself when safety failed. 'Assi' is a film about who is allowed to see clearly, who chooses not to and who is punished for insisting on sight.
In the car, brutality unfolds alongside something quieter, refusal. The driver keeps the car moving while murmuring in protest. Another man watches his peers for approval instead of looking at the woman in front of him. Care is reserved for kin. A stranger doesn't qualify.
The same logic governs institutions. The police officer doesn't recognise injustice in principle. Empathy in 'Assi' travels through familiarity — someone's daughter, someone's wife, never simply a citizen. When asked to identify the men, she says she can't recognise them clearly and apologises. The system demands precision, while trauma has already reorganised perception. The rest is institutional theatre, as CCTV footage lost to monkeys, as if the state must borrow wildlife to excuse its own disappearance.
The accused are ordered to uncover their faces. Parima wraps herself in a white floral dupatta before entering. No one asks her to unveil. She must decide to expose herself. When she finally does, the prosecutor turns away. He prefers the safety of the abstract file over the survivor's presence.
Visibility becomes another labour assigned to the survivor. Outside the courtroom, witnessing becomes a spectacle. Neighbours gather at her house, converting trauma into something that can be attended, discussed and exited before dinner.
Even the camera is complicit in this choreography. It begins in detachment, framing arguments from behind or alongside the prosecution, aligning the viewer with procedure rather than pain. Only gradually does it shift closer to Raavi. Seeing here isn't innocent. It's staged, recalibrated and finally weaponised.
Parima is the most legible candidate for justice as a married, employed, supported and articulate woman. Yet she is reduced to 'Victim X', a bureaucratic placeholder. The film consciously selects the survivor who can be spoken for. If even she struggles to remain visible, what happens to those who don't fit the template? The rest dissolve into statistical residue, unnamed in public and rehearsing self-blame in private, while the nation continues to count without looking.
Original Source
Millennium Post · 18 February 2026
Wuthering Heights: Catherine Earnshaw and The Fluency of Confinement
A tightened corset, repeated dialogue, colours that discipline rather than decorate
Catherine Earnshaw isn't destroyed in this adaptation of 'Wuthering Heights'. She is trained. In the movie, no tyrant looms over Catherine. What unsettles instead is a woman undone not by force, but by fluency. Unlike readings that frame Catherine as torn between wild instinct and social order, this adaptation presents her as conversant in both.
The key image arrives early and it is almost too plain to argue with. Nelly tightens Catherine's corset. Even when Nelly warns she will not be able to breathe, Catherine repeats the instruction as compliance presented as a decision. The body must take a certain shape to survive within a certain world. She requests the shaping.
From there, power operates through management rather than force. Nelly is central to this. She saves, betrays, protects and withholds. Yet none of this is framed as villainy or Gothic antagonism. It is the everyday management of what can be known and what must remain unsaid.
Repetition reveals training. The egg prank occurs once as a playful impulse and again as a message, the second time noticeably dulled. The storm dialogue repeats with reversed speakers, less romantic echo than emotional recalibration.
By the time she is confined to bed, colour draining from her body, having stated plainly that she has lost her child, there is no visible authority present. No husband instructing her to remain still. No servant restraining her. No lover is exerting influence. She is alone.
In a moment so brief it risks invisibility, a hand emerges from beneath the bed and grips her ankle, returning her to sitting. The camera doesn't underline it. The correction simply occurs.
Catherine survives by learning the shape of her enclosure so thoroughly that she can no longer imagine standing outside it. The most chilling detail in this adaptation isn't the hand itself. It is the absence of reaction. Discipline no longer requires supervision once absorbed. What began as a request for tightening ends as an automatic correction. The tragedy isn't confinement, but that confinement feels correct.
Original Source
Millennium Post · 11 February 2026
Mayasabha: The 35mm Isolation Ward
A defunct cinema hall turned into an architecture of control
In the stagnant air of 'Mayasabha', time doesn't pass; it accumulates. 'Mayasabha', a defunct cinema hall that doubles as a home, functions as a piece of encasement architecture, where trauma is a material weight. At the centre of this rot is Parameshwar Khanna, the failed producer who forgot to yell 'cut'. His bankruptcy forces his son to inhabit the sets of a movie that will never be released.
The most tragic 'casting' is reserved for the feminine. Jaymala, the mother, exists only as a framed film poster. As a '35mm ghost', she is the only source of colour in a grey world, yet she is immobile.
This architecture of encasement is the film's central trap. Every object is a cage, and every cage carries history. The architecture is designed to hold people exactly where they are.
We see this most clearly in Vashusen's helmet. It is not permanent skin. He reaches for it only when Parmeshwar becomes a threat, retreating into the yellow plastic as a sensory shield against a father who has spent decades muffling his son's identity.
What finally distinguishes Vashu from Parameshwar isn't courage, but imagination. Where his father clung to obscurity, Vashu dreams of excess clarity from the start. His ambition for a Rolls-Royce painted yellow, inside and out, isn't materialistic but architectural transparency. He wants a world where the inside matches the outside.
When the smog thins, Vashu is left suspended between a structure he survived and a world the film refuses to imagine for him.
Original Source
Millennium Post · 2 February 2026
When Sarvam Maya Finally Sits Down
It makes you feel slightly uneasy for a long time and then, without announcing anything, it suddenly sits down
The nicest trick 'Sarvam Maya' pulls is that it makes you feel slightly uneasy for a long time and then, without announcing anything, it suddenly doesn't. The movie feels like a polite, over-correcting, anxious person in a room who keeps adjusting the cushions instead of sitting down.
The unease begins early and politely. In a concert sequence, musicians are thanked and instruments are named. Everything is orderly and respectful until the camera reaches the guitar and pauses on the wrong one. A classical guitar gets its moment while the electric guitar waits patiently off frame. The pause is brief, polite even, but unmistakable.
Music is the most obvious tell. It enters scenes early, often before emotions have decided what they are. At first, it feels comforting. Then enthusiastic. Eventually, it starts to feel like someone is filling the silence because silence might ask uncomfortable questions.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, an old idea starts hovering in the background, not as philosophy, but as lived experience. The 'Purusharth' cycle, not from a textbook, but from daily life.
'Moksha', if one must use the word, doesn't show up here as transcendence. It shows up as relief. The shift isn't announced. It's felt. Sound backs off. Moments are allowed to land without assistance.
'Sarvam Maya' leaves you unexpectedly cheerful. It's ease, the feeling that comes when something finally stops correcting itself mid-sentence.
Somewhere along the way, the right guitar gets named. And the film, finally, sits down.
Original Source
Millennium Post · 28 January 2026
When Cinema Pauses, Gandhi Enters
How cinema has engaged with Gandhi through tone, hesitation and presence
Every Indian grows up with Gandhi as a presence. He exists in photographs, in classrooms, on currency notes and in the larger public memory. Cinema, too, has never entirely let go of him. What has changed isn't Gandhi himself, but the way films choose to sit with him.
Gandhi is one of the few figures in cinema who seems to change simply by walking into a different space. His idea doesn't alter, but the room around him does.
In Richard Attenborough's 'Gandhi', the world seems to slow down in his presence. The camera lingers. Silence is allowed to stretch. His white clothes blend into the light, as if he belongs as much to the frame as to history itself.
That clarity begins to strain in 'Sardar', where Gandhian idealism meets Vallabhbhai Patel's administrative urgency. The film doesn't dismantle Gandhi's authority, but it allows tension to exist.
Then comes 'Lage Raho Munna Bhai', one of Hindi cinema's most emotionally intimate engagements with Gandhi, which does something radical in its gentleness. It turns Gandhi into a companion rather than a commander.
Regional cinema often appears more at ease with him. In 'Hey Ram', Gandhi is neither a pedestal nor comfort. The assassination isn't treated as distant history, but as a psychological rupture.
Today, Gandhi enters films not through physical presence but through tonal shift. You recognise the moment he arrives, even when he is unseen.
Gandhi doesn't ask cinema to follow him. He asks it to pause. And cinema, like society, keeps deciding how much of that pause it can afford.
Original Source
Millennium Post · 25 January 2026
Cheekatilo: A Film Built on Restraint
The film trusts the viewer to notice shifts without being guided toward them
A moment from the trailer captures the film's tone with quiet precision. Sobhita's character, unsettled and seated at her desk in a blazer, is casually crowned by her intern. The gesture is celebratory, almost awkward. The space does not respond. The film does not frame the contrast as irony or triumph. It simply moves on, leaving the moment unresolved.
That withholding is central to 'Cheekatilo'. The title loosely translates to 'in the dark' and the film lives up to it structurally. Meaning is rarely illuminated directly. It accumulates slowly, sometimes ambiguously.
The film trusts the viewer to notice shifts without being guided toward them.
Art director Pranay Naini's approach keeps spaces from performing for the camera. This is most visible in the podcast room, which avoids the stylised, aspirational look common to such settings.
Minimalism, however, comes with a clear trade-off. The design rarely intervenes to heighten emotion, even at moments where the narrative might traditionally do so.
In 'Cheekatilo', tension doesn't arrive dressed up. It settles into rooms that look ordinary enough to ignore. The film trusts these spaces to hold scenes without assistance and that decision shapes almost everything that follows.
Original Source
Free Press Journal · 8 March 2026
Bura Na Mano, It’s Cinema: When Celebration Becomes Camouflage
On how cinema dresses up uncomfortable truths in festivity
In Hindi cinema, Holi is more than colour and spectacle. The festival dissolves faces, muffles voices and turns crowds into cover, allowing filmmakers to stage desire, violence and transgression in plain sight.
Every time Hindi cinema films Holi, it performs the same trick. The screen erupts into its most extravagant state, and yet, the human face disappears. Everyone is visible. No one is legible. It is the perfect crime, and Indian filmmakers have been committing it, with varying degrees of self-awareness, for decades.
Holi has been lazily theorised as a stock trope of Hindi cinema, an excuse for colour and spectacle. It is neither. It collapses the three conditions cinema normally depends on: recognisable faces, intelligible dialogue, and actions attributable to individuals.
Darr (1993) offers the purest and darkest demonstration. Shah Rukh Khan's obsessive Rahul reaches Kiran through the festival crowd, applies colour to her face, and vanishes before her fiancé can identify him. The easy reading is a disguise. The more disturbing one runs deeper — Rahul is not hiding behind a mask. He is hiding behind a social norm.
Where Darr deploys Holi as a weapon of violation, Silsila (1981) demonstrates something more insidious — transgression hidden not from the audience, but from social consequence. During "Rang Barse," Amit and Chandni, both married to other people, touch and express years of suppressed desire in the middle of a crowded celebration.
Damini (1993) is where camouflage logic becomes a matter of life and justice. Santoshi intercuts Holi revelry with a rape, showing how the festival's licensed permission is weaponised into violation.
The question the best Holi cinema forces is brutal: for whom does the festival authorise? Anurag Kashyap's Gulaal (2009) is the film that refuses. His handheld camera stays close to the body and the violence. It refuses the swirl and aestheticisation. Kashyap restores the blood to the gulal.
The most honest Indian filmmakers have turned the camera around, and asked, "What are we hiding, and for whom?"
Original Source
Free Press Journal · 1 March 2026
Measured Violence: How Assi Turns Rape Into a System
How Assi portrays rape as a system rather than a crime in silo
The film, Assi, doesn't let its viewers escape.
Steel roars past on either side, indifferent and punctual, as the film's prelude. A man lifts a raped woman and carries her toward a hospital. Even before the film names the crime, it reveals the structure: violence will occur in the gap between departures.
The title itself, the number eighty, functions as a grim metronome. Every 20 minutes, the screen bleeds red as another woman turns into a statistic in the audience's world.
The film juxtaposes the language of tenderness with the mechanics of domination. Early on, Parima counts down "3...2...1" to calm her son while fixing his zip. It is a moment of domestic safety where numbers serve to calm a child. Later, in the white car, the men count thrusts. Arithmetic is meant to clarify. Here, it numbs.
The transformation of Parima into "Victim X" deepens this logic. When the system cannot protect a body, it abstracts it. Justice or bureaucracy, the shot suggests, has grown heavier than childhood.
The "good men" in the car extend this logic further. The film suggests that rape culture is sustained not by monsters alone, but by the passive "good men" who privately disagree but publicly comply, much like the driver in the car who says "don't do it" but never actually hits the brakes.
Parima's psychological aftermath refuses the cinema's usual relationship to survivor trauma. Her brain has partially erased the incident as self-protection. The film understands what trauma science has long shown — memory gaps are not weakness. They are survival.
Raavi delivers the film's central political thesis. Women get angry and can burn the world down. They just don't want to. The film refuses to offer catharsis through revenge.
Assi leaves the question hanging: which inheritance wins? The driver does not stop the car. The officer does not stop the file. The audience leaves the theatre with the ticking of a twenty-minute clock that, in the real world, never truly stops.
Original Source
Free Press Journal · 22 February 2026
The Licensed Man: How O Romeo Rewrites the Gangster
How O Romeo rewrites the gangster through licensed masculinity
There is a moment in O Romeo that the film seems almost embarrassed to find funny. Ustara cries messily after Afsha leaves, with grief that has no audience in mind. The camera does not look away. It holds him at a slight remove, pain fully visible, dignity faintly negotiable.
O Romeo is not a gangster film. It is a study of permission. Every character, from the killers to the widows, performs for the gaze of ghosts, whether it is a dead father, a murdered husband, or even a stillborn child.
Yet the film withholds foundational wounds. We never see Ustara's father die. We do not witness Rabia's own death, or the birth of her stillborn child. Origin violence remains narrated, not shown. Spectacle is reserved for reaction. Masculinity here is licensed through unseen grief.
No one in O Romeo lives inside their own story. Afsha is defined by her husband's debt and then his death. Rabia lives inside a child she never got to hold. Every act of violence answers a wound that predates the scene.
The cowboy hat is the exception. Unlike the razor, it is chosen. When he places it on her, it reads less as romance than recognition. In a film where every identity is inherited or imposed, this is the only moment he chooses what he passes on.
The Spain sequence is where the film's visual argument reaches its pinnacle. Afsha arrives into Venetian masquerade, baroque excess, vivid white masks with aggressive feathers, and wears pastels anyway. The collision is deliberate.
The film never pretends the ghosts are gone. In a cinematic culture that equates masculinity with dominance, O Romeo proposes something riskier. Masculinity here is not innate. It is licensed. And the only rebellion it imagines is refusing renewal.
Original Source
Free Press Journal · 15 February 2026
Mayasabha: Living in the Projection Light
The layered character of Vashusen in Mayasabha
Some sons inherit land. Some inherit debt. Vashusen (Vashu) inherits a story.
Mayasabha is not about a son trapped by a father. It is about a son trapped by a narrative that predates him. Vashu never meets Jaymala or Sohrab, yet they orbit his life like twin suns he has been warned never to look at. His childhood is not built on memory, but on narration.
Mayasabha's cinema hall is not a house. It is a mausoleum with tickets still on sale. Posters fade but never fall. Smog lingers like a thought refusing to die. Vashu is on night duty, preserving evidence like a watchman guarding heartbreak that was never his.
The yellow helmet is not cowardice, it is filtration. Living inside someone else's bitterness requires a visor. The helmet narrows sight, muffles sound, and controls exposure. It is a private atmosphere inside a public ruin.
Parmeshwar, his father, sprays DDT obsessively, as if mosquitoes carry contamination. He fears memory, not insects. Unable to control desire, reputation, or abandonment, he over-controls air. But trauma does not evaporate with pesticide. It settles. Vashu grows up breathing what his father tried to kill.
Gold, too, shifts meaning. It is never about greed. For Vashu, gold is proof of his father not being entirely delusional — that years of isolation had substance. The child's need is simple and brutal: "Tell me this was not pointless."
The ending refuses spectacle. Instead of revelation, we get atmosphere. Instead of exposure, we get smoke. Vashu does not tear down the illusion he was raised inside. He does something gentler and more radical. He lets it remain ambiguous. But the boy who lived inside the projection light walks into unfiltered air.
Original Source
Deccan Herald · 17 April 2026
Lights Out
What Aandhi, Vishwaroopam and The Voice of Hind Rajab tell us about cinema’s oldest struggle
Picture this: a film is running in theatres. Audiences are buying tickets, critics are writing reviews, and the projector is spinning. Then, one day, without warning, the lights go out. Not because the film failed. Because it succeeded a little too well at the one thing cinema does better than any other art form, making you see something you weren't supposed to.
It has happened before. It is happening now.
There is a quiet scene in Gulzar's Aandhi (1975) where the politician Aarti Devi spots her old caretaker in the hotel lobby where she is staying for an election campaign. Just a face from a simpler life, and on Suchitra Sen's face, an entire interior world collapses and reassembles in seconds. Aandhi returned to screens only after the political weather changed. Today it is considered a masterwork. Back then, it was considered a problem.
Nearly four decades later, Kamal Haasan's Vishwaroopam offered a moment of a completely different kind. For most of its first act, the film presents its protagonist as an unlikely, almost comical figure, an effeminate Kathak dance teacher in New York. Then, in a single scene, the mask drops. And yet it was this very film, already certified by the CBFC, that was halted by district collectors in Tamil Nadu following protests. The irony is worth sitting with. A film whose entire thesis was about mistaken assumptions was itself the subject of one.
What makes the Hind Rajab case particularly striking is the nakedness of it — the documentary's raw footage rejected outright by the CBFC without even a pretext.
Three films. Three different eras. Three competing anxieties — political, communal, diplomatic. One identical outcome.
Indian cinema has produced some of its most enduring work precisely by pushing at these boundaries. What these films remind us is that cinema does not exist in a vacuum. Every frame is made somewhere, released somewhere, and watched by someone.
The lights go out. But the projector keeps spinning.
Original Source