top of page

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.

Coffee Diplomacy

Correspondent
Dec 1, 2025
3 min read

Venezuela’s embattled strongman resurfaces amid rising American pressure as an old oil war returns in new form.

After several days of unexplained absence that had fuelled fevered speculation in Caracas and beyond, President Nicolás Maduro chose an unlikely venue to reappear: a specialty-coffee awards ceremony in eastern Caracas. Slipping back into public view by pinning medals on farmers and sipping espresso before cameras, he spoke not of warships or sanctions but of resilience, declaring Venezuela “indestructible, untouchable, unbeatable.” It was an effort at reassurance, both to his supporters and to wavering elites. Yet the symbolism was impossible to miss. Maduro surfaced just as pressure from the United States was intensifying sharply and moments after Donald Trump confirmed that the two leaders had spoken by phone.


The call, Trump said with studied ambiguity, went “neither well nor badly.” In the past few weeks, Washington has moved more than a dozen warships into the Caribbean, deployed roughly 15,000 troops across the region and expanded maritime strikes on vessels it claims are linked to drug trafficking. Caracas insists the campaign is merely the latest pretext for regime change.


At one level, this confrontation is being framed as law enforcement versus criminal enterprise. At a deeper level, it is a familiar struggle over sovereignty, influence and oil. Venezuela possesses some of the world’s largest proven petroleum reserves. For more than a century, its hydrocarbons have shaped its domestic politics and its relationship with the United States. Oil allowed the country to build one of Latin America’s most durable twentieth-century democracies and later funded Hugo Chávez’s break with it. When Chávez recast the state as a revolutionary petro-power in the early 2000s, he also recast Washington as his principal antagonist.


Maduro inherited not only that ideological conflict but also the fragile economic model beneath it. When global oil prices collapsed after 2014 and American sanctions tightened, the Bolivarian system began to fail catastrophically. Hyperinflation wiped out savings. Power cuts became routine. Public services imploded. More than seven million Venezuelans fled abroad in the largest migration in modern Latin American history. Sanctions, diplomatic isolation and the international recognition of an alternative presidency under Juan Guaidó were meant to force a transition. Instead, they entrenched a hardened security state.


For years Washington relied on economic strangulation and diplomatic pressure to dislodge Maduro. Neither worked. Today the strategy appears to be shifting from financial suffocation toward military intimidation.


Maduro, for his part, has chosen to internationalise the conflict. In a letter to the secretary general of OPEC, he accused the United States of seeking to seize Venezuelan oil reserves by force and of endangering global energy stability. The precedent is not flattering to Washington. From Iran in 1953 to Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011, energy security has repeatedly fused with interventionism.


Yet to portray Venezuela merely as a victim of imperial appetite is to ignore how thoroughly its own institutions have been hollowed out. Elections have been manipulated, opposition figures jailed or exiled, courts subordinated and the military bound ever tighter to the ruling party’s survival.


What makes the present moment especially combustible is the weakening of the external buffers that once protected Caracas. Russia, long a diplomatic shield and military supplier, is consumed by its war in Ukraine. China has quietly retreated from large-scale lending to Venezuela after years of unpaid debts and failed projects. Iran remains a tactical partner but lacks the capacity to absorb Venezuela’s economic collapse. Even Latin America, once ideologically divided over Chávez and his heirs, now responds with fatigue rather than solidarity.


That leaves Maduro dangerously exposed. His reappearance at a coffee ceremony was meant to project calm continuity and personal control. Instead, it underscored how narrow his room for manoeuvre has become. Washington hints at escalation without committing itself. Caracas shouts sovereignty while acknowledging civilian deaths.


Venezuela’s tragedy is that its fate is once more being shaped by forces far larger than its shattered economy and exhausted society. Oil, ideology and American power are converging again, just as they have at so many ruinous crossroads in the past. 


Comments

bottom of page