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By:

Kiran D. Tare

21 August 2024 at 4:53:13 pm

From Doctor to Box-Office Disruptor

Vishal Chaturvedi has turned a deeply personal spiritual story into one of 2026’s biggest box-office surprises. In an industry where films routinely arrive with star salaries running into crores, lavish sets and multi-crore marketing campaigns, Hanuman Ansh is a striking anomaly. Made on a shoestring budget reportedly in the region of Rs. 2 crore, the ‘spiritual’ film opened last month to a modest box-office collection. Within weeks, however, audiences began taking a shine to the film with...

From Doctor to Box-Office Disruptor

Vishal Chaturvedi has turned a deeply personal spiritual story into one of 2026’s biggest box-office surprises. In an industry where films routinely arrive with star salaries running into crores, lavish sets and multi-crore marketing campaigns, Hanuman Ansh is a striking anomaly. Made on a shoestring budget reportedly in the region of Rs. 2 crore, the ‘spiritual’ film opened last month to a modest box-office collection. Within weeks, however, audiences began taking a shine to the film with the phenomenal result that its domestic collections had surged past the Rs. 150 crore mark. Whatever the final tally, the fact that a film made for a fraction of the budgets of mainstream Bollywood productions has emerged as a major commercial success has raised eyebrows. The man responsible for this is Vishal Chaturvedi, a doctor-turned-filmmaker, writer and producer whose route to cinema has been anything but conventional. Chaturvedi was born and brought up in Lucknow and completed his MBBS from Gorakhpur in 2006. While posted in Haldwani that year, he visited Kainchi Dham. It was there that he encountered the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba, the spiritual figure whose life and philosophy would eventually become the foundation of his first feature film. For almost two decades, the thought of making a film around Neem Karoli Baba remained with Chaturvedi. His journey towards Hanuman Ansh itself reportedly took nearly 14 years. Along the way, he left medicine and even gave up music before committing himself fully to filmmaking. What might appear in retrospect as an overnight success was therefore anything but overnight. Hanuman Ansh tells the story of Lakshminarayan, who would later become Neem Karoli Baba. Following his mother’s death, the young Lakshman leaves home in search of God. His journey through forests, temples and villages becomes a gradual renunciation of worldly life and a movement towards spirituality. The film also incorporates episodes associated with Neem Karoli Baba, including the famous account of a British train being stopped after he was forced off it. But perhaps the most revealing part of Chaturvedi’s story is not what he put into the film, but what he deliberately kept out while writing it. He removed digital devices from his room and wrote the story entirely by hand. His assistants subsequently photographed the handwritten pages and converted them into digital form. He spent nearly 45 days writing the first scene alone. For Chaturvedi, however, the first scene was the foundation of the entire film. Once he had found it, the rest of the screenplay came together rapidly, taking another 15 to 20 days. Hanuman Ansh was the culmination of a personal conviction that had survived for nearly 20 years. Its success also raises a larger question about the changing economics of Indian cinema. The film is unlikely to signal the death of stars, spectacle or big budgets. Nor does every low-budget film with a strong idea automatically become a blockbuster. But Hanuman Ansh, alongside other recent successes such as Dhurandhar, points towards something increasingly important: content can create its own market when audiences feel they have discovered something worth talking about. The old model depended heavily on pre-release visibility. The new one increasingly depends on post-release conversation. A film need not necessarily dominate advertising if audiences themselves become its marketing department. That is particularly significant for films operating outside the traditional Bollywood template. Hanuman Ansh does not have the conventional ingredients of a commercial blockbuster. Its subject is spiritual, its central character is not a contemporary superstar and its budget was tiny by industry standards. Yet its audience appears to have expanded precisely because it offered something different. Today, audiences are becoming less willing to accept that the size of a film’s budget determines its value. They can reject an expensive production and embrace a modest one if the latter connects emotionally, culturally or spiritually. For Chaturvedi, the irony is striking. A man who walked away from medicine to pursue filmmaking spent years chasing a story that the mainstream industry apparently did not rush to embrace. That makes Hanuman Ansh’s success more than a box-office curiosity. It is a reminder that while budgets and big-name stars may buy scale and draw attention, the belief among audiences that a particular film is telling a solid story and hence must be seen is priceless. Chaturvedi appears to have spent years building his belief around one story. Judging by the box office receipts, the audience, too, seems to have bought into it.

Arctic Delusions

Correspondent
Jan 14
3 min read

By treating Greenland as a piece of real estate, America risks turning the high north into its next geopolitical wound.

Greenland, the world’s largest island and one of its smallest political communities, has spent most of its modern history trying to escape being someone else’s chessboard. That is why Jens-Frederik Nielsen’s blunt declaration in Copenhagen - that if forced to choose between Washington and Copenhagen, Greenland would choose Denmark - matters far beyond the 57,000 souls who inhabit that vast, ice-locked land. It is a rebuke not just to US President Donald Trump’s latest imperial fantasy, but to a centuries-old habit among great powers of mistaking geography for entitlement.


Trump’s renewed threats to annex Greenland by “economic means” or more chillingly, by force are downright dangerous. They cut directly against the principles of self-determination, territorial integrity and the rule of law that America once claimed to embody. Greenland is a self-governing society with its own parliament, language and political memory. To speak of “taking control” of it is to revert to a 19th-century worldview that even the most cynical imperialists have mostly abandoned.


The irony is that Greenland’s strategic value is real, and has been for a century. During the Second World War, the United States, fearing Nazi encroachment, took on responsibility for the island’s defence and built airfields that became vital stepping stones between North America and Europe. In the Cold War, Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Space Base) formed a crucial part of America’s early-warning system against Soviet missiles arcing over the pole. Today, as melting ice opens new shipping lanes and exposes mineral riches, Greenland again sits at the hinge of global power politics.


Yet history also teaches a different lesson: Greenlanders have repeatedly been the losers when outsiders play geopolitics on their soil. Denmark ruled the island as a colony until 1953, often with a paternalism that left deep scars. Forced relocations to make way for American bases, cultural erosion and economic dependency bred a quiet, stubborn nationalism. The home-rule agreement of 1979 and the self-government act of 2009 were meant to put Greenland on a gradual path to full sovereignty, not to swap one patron for another.


That is why the island’s voters have consistently favoured caution over rupture. Independence is a cherished aspiration, but also a daunting one for a society reliant on Danish subsidies and vulnerable to the brutal economics of the Arctic. In last year’s elections, three-quarters backed parties advocating a slow, negotiated transition. Nielsen’s declaration that now is the time to “stand together” within the Danish realm is not a retreat from nationhood.

Trump’s bluster has driven Greenland and Denmark closer together and jolted Europe into rediscovering its Arctic flank. Berlin and London’s talk of a European military presence in Greenland may sound theatrical, but it reflects a hard truth. The North Atlantic and the Arctic are becoming arenas of rivalry between America, Russia and, increasingly, China. Moscow is reviving Soviet-era bases along its polar coast; Beijing styles itself a “near-Arctic state” and covets Greenland’s rare earths. Against that backdrop, Europe cannot afford a vacuum or a unilateral American land-grab.


The American administration’s defenders might argue that Washington merely wants to secure vital territory before its rivals do. But that logic collapses under scrutiny. The United States already has extensive defence rights in Greenland under existing treaties with Denmark. Its forces operate there freely. Worse, Trump’s threats hand propaganda victories to America’s adversaries. When China bullies Taiwan or the Philippines, it invokes international law. To then float the idea of seizing Greenland is to shred that moral authority and invite every strongman to do the same.


Greenland’s quiet, icy landscapes have long concealed their global importance.


But they are no blank slate on which a superpower can scribble its ambitions. Nielsen’s choice of Denmark over America is less an endorsement of the old colonial tie than a defence of the right of small peoples to decide their own fate. If Washington cannot respect that in the Arctic, it will find that the cold winds there blow back.

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