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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.

Axis of Pretence

Correspondent
Jan 6
3 min read

When Beijing and Islamabad lecture the world on bullying, the joke is not lost on Asia.

China and Pakistan have discovered a new cause in jointly opposing “hegemonism,” “bullying behaviours” and the formation of “small circles.” Their joint communiqué, issued after the seventh round of their foreign ministers’ strategic dialogue in Beijing, was a sermon on multilateral virtue aimed squarely at India and its partners in the Quad. It was also a masterclass in geopolitical hypocrisy.


Both sides reaffirmed their devotion to the UN Charter, free trade and sovereign equality, while denouncing bloc politics and violations of national sovereignty. The target was unmistakable: India’s expanding partnerships with Japan and Australia, and Washington’s open endorsement of India as a stabilising force in the Indian Ocean Region.


China’s moralising would be comical were it not so consequential. Few countries have done more to normalise coercion in Asia. From the South China Sea, where Vietnam and the Philippines face relentless pressure, to the Himalayas, where Bhutan’s claims are quietly eroded, China’s diplomacy often arrives backed by coastguard cutters, economic leverage or “salami-sliced” military facts on the ground. Even its trade policy has acquired a punitive edge, deployed to discipline smaller states that displease Beijing.


Pakistan, long the region’s most reliable exporter of instability, was no less brazen in its contribution to the lecture. Such bravado rings hollow from a state whose security doctrine has for decades rested on nurturing jihadist proxies, from the mountains of Kashmir to the massacre at Pahalgam, and then denying responsibility with ritualised indignation.


Pakistan’s refusal to abandon terror as an instrument of statecraft, or to explain why a country perpetually pleading victimhood abroad continues to depend on militancy at home and patrons abroad for relevance, shapes the communiqué’s most revealing passages.


Even as Beijing and Islamabad rail against “small circles,” they are busily assembling their own. The newly advertised trilaterals with Afghanistan and the China-Bangladesh-Pakistan framework echo a strategy that dates back to the Cold War, when China first embraced Pakistan as a useful southern flank against India after the 1962 war. Since then, exclusion has been policy, not accident. Regional architectures that sideline New Delhi have long appealed to a partnership built less on shared values than on a shared interest in hemming in Indian power. Bloc politics, it seems, are objectionable only when others practise them. When conducted under Chinese auspices, exclusion is rebranded as “regional cooperation.”


The double standard grows starker on terrorism. The two sides urged the world to avoid “selective approaches” and condemned “double standards,” even as China went one better on the hypocrisy scale by lavishing praise on Pakistan’s “significant contributions and huge sacrifices” in combating terrorism.


For years Beijing has shielded Islamabad at the United Nations, placing technical holds on the designation of Pakistan-based militants and treating terrorism less as a regional scourge than as a diplomatic inconvenience so long as its immediate interests are not threatened.


China’s engagement with Afghanistan has been narrowly instrumental: containing unrest in Xinjiang, preventing spillover into its western provinces and safeguarding prospective investments. Neither approach has been animated by any serious commitment to a rules-based regional order. Yet both now speak the language of accountability as though it were newly discovered.


The subtext of the communiqué is strategic insecurity. China bristles at a Quad that complicates its maritime ambitions and legitimises balancing behaviour across the Indo-Pacific. Pakistan, accustomed to defining itself in opposition to India, resents a neighbour whose partnerships amplify its influence far beyond South Asia and steadily erode Islamabad’s claim to strategic relevance. Together, they cloak their unease in the rhetoric of multilateralism, hoping to recast voluntary alignment as aggression and defensive cooperation as conspiracy.


India’s partnerships, by contrast, are neither coerced nor clandestine. They are transparent, issue-based and welcomed by countries that have learned, often the hard way, the costs of Chinese assertiveness and Pakistani adventurism. Beijing and Islamabad will continue to describe their relationship as “ironclad” and to set ever-new goals for their “all-weather” partnership. In Asia’s crowded theatre, hypocrisy is common. But rarely has it been so meticulously rehearsed or so conspicuously on display. 


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