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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.

Damascus Gambit

Correspondent
Nov 11, 2025
3 min read

Washington’s courtship of Syria’s former jihadist-turned-president reveals how swiftly geopolitics can turn enemies into partners.

America’s foreign policy in the Middle East has always had a flair for reinvention. Its latest experiment in welcoming Syria’s Ahmed al-Sharaa into the global coalition against the Islamic State may be its boldest yet. Barely a year ago, the United States branded the man a terrorist and placed a bounty on his head. Today, he is feted at the White House as a reformer and ally.


The announcement that Syria will join the 90-nation coalition against jihadist remnants marks not merely a diplomatic thaw but a full-blown reversal. Of course, sanctions on Syria had already been suspended earlier this year by President Donald Trump during his Middle Eastern tour. The Caesar Act, Washington’s chief sanctioning instrument against the Assad regime, has been frozen.


For Washington, the calculus appears simple. The Islamic State’s embers still glow across the Syrian desert, and America’s appetite for direct military engagement has long waned. Al-Sharaa, once the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham - an offshoot of Al-Qaeda - commands the tribal networks and battlefield experience that Washington now finds useful. To the Trump administration, he is a man hardened enough to impose order where American soldiers no longer tread.


Syria’s long agony, however, gives this new partnership a darker resonance. Thirteen years after the uprising that began in Daraa in 2011, the Assad dynasty is gone but the wreckage endures in form of a hollowed-out economy, a fractured state and a society scarred by sectarian mistrust. Into this vacuum stepped al-Sharaa, a onetime insurgent who now sells himself as a moderniser intent on rebuilding a shattered country. Despite speaking of a “new era” of reconstruction and reconciliation, violence still flares between Bedouin and Druze militias, and reports of killings of Alawite minorities continue to emerge from Syria.


The United States has walked this path before. In the 1980s, it armed Saddam Hussein to counter Iran, only to confront him later in Kuwait. Two decades ago, Muammar Qaddafi was courted as a partner against terrorism, before NATO warplanes toppled him. In Iraq, insurgents were rebadged as ‘Sons of Iraq’ and paid to police the peace they had once shattered. Will the rehabilitation of al-Sharaa fit this pattern of short-term utility trumping long-term memory?


Al-Sharaa’s transformation from jihadist commander to President owes much to timing. After breaking with Al-Qaeda, his forces emerged as the dominant power in north-western Syria, combining Islamist rhetoric with bureaucratic pragmatism. When the Assad regime collapsed, he was well-placed to seize control. Since then, his government has sought legitimacy through cautious engagement with the West, while still tolerating elements of the old militias.


For the Trump administration, lifting sanctions and restoring diplomatic ties is not so much a reward for reform as a bid for influence. By drawing Damascus away from Tehran and Moscow, Washington hopes to anchor a new balance of power in the Levant. In theory, a ‘normalised’ Syria could act as a buffer against both Iranian expansionism and jihadist resurgence. But that vision rests on an untested assumption that al-Sharaa’s ambitions align with America’s, and that his past will not resurface when interests diverge.


Rehabilitating a former jihadist to stabilise a war-torn state is a gamble steeped in irony. The United States once found in Egypt’s Anwar Sadat a partner who recast the Arab world’s relationship with the West. But where Sadat inherited institutions and a functioning state, al-Sharaa presides over rubble. Reconstruction will demand not just money but legitimacy.


The rapprochement may yield tactical dividends in form of intelligence sharing, coordination against residual Islamic State cells, perhaps even movement toward peace with Israel. But to airily speak of a “new era” in such a fraught landscape is to forget how easily old ghosts can return.


Whether this partnership heralds stability or merely rehearses another cycle of betrayal will depend not on the promises made in the Oval Office, but on whether Syria itself can finally break free from the gravity of its own past.

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