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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.

Democratic Mirage

Correspondent
Dec 26, 2025
3 min read

Somalia’s flirtation with universal suffrage promises democratic renewal but risks entrenching elite power in a country where the state remains perilously thin.

For the first time in more than half a century, residents of Mogadishu queued up to choose their municipal leaders by direct vote. To foreign diplomats and Somalia’s own weary reformers, the images carried a powerful symbolism of a country long synonymous with state collapse gingerly reclaiming the rituals of democracy.


The last time Somalis voted directly in national elections was in 1969, months before Mohamed Siad Barre’s coup ushered in two decades of authoritarian rule, followed by one of the modern world’s most complete state implosions. Since Barre’s overthrow in 1991, Somalia has been governed by improvisation: warlordism gave way to Islamist rule, foreign intervention and, eventually, a fragile federal order stitched together under heavy international tutelage. Elections, when they returned in 2004, were indirect by design. Clan elders selected lawmakers and lawmakers chose the president. In a shattered polity riven by clan rivalries and stalked by jihadists, consensus mattered more than ballots.


Two decades on, that ‘pragmatic’ logic has curdled into something else. Indirect elections have ossified into an elite cartel, lucrative for politicians and brokers who thrive in the shadows of clan arithmetic. Parliamentary seats are bought and sold. Presidents are chosen not by citizens but by carefully managed caucuses. Mogadishu’s mayor, until now, was appointed from above. Ordinary Somalis, particularly the young, have watched politics become a closed shop.


Against this backdrop, the municipal poll is meant to be a rehearsal for universal suffrage in a country where more than 70 percent of the population is under 30. A 2024 law restored the principle of one person, one vote, and federal elections are notionally slated for next year.


In theory, Somalia is turning the page. But in practice, the script remains familiar. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has already cut a deal with segments of the opposition ensuring that, while lawmakers will be directly elected in 2026, the president himself will still be chosen by parliament. This has led Opposition figures to complain that the rushed introduction of a new system favours the incumbent, who controls the levers of state and the flow of foreign funds.


Security concerns provide the most obvious alibi. Al Shabaab, al-Qaeda’s East African franchise, still controls large swathes of the countryside and retains the ability to strike at will in major cities. Mogadishu may be safer than it was a decade ago, but it remains one of the world’s most dangerous capitals. Asking millions to vote under such conditions is no small feat. Yet security has long served as both a real constraint and a convenient excuse. Somali leaders invoke it to delay reforms that might dilute their influence, even as they struggle to extend the state’s writ beyond a few urban islands.


Somalia’s political order rests on an uneasy bargain between clans, regions and foreign patrons. Federalism, meant to accommodate diversity, has instead produced mini-fiefdoms dependent on external backers from Ethiopia and Kenya to Turkey, the Gulf states and the West. Each has its own interests: counterterrorism, port access, Red Sea trade routes, or simple geopolitical leverage. Elections, direct or otherwise, unfold within this crowded chessboard.


History offers sobering lessons. Somalia’s brief democratic experiment in the 1960s collapsed under the weight of corruption, patronage and Cold War meddling. Barre’s dictatorship promised unity and delivered ruin. The Islamist interlude of the 2000s imposed order of a grim sort before provoking invasion and insurgency. At each turn, institutional shortcuts produced short-term stability at the cost of long-term legitimacy.


That is why Mogadishu’s municipal vote matters and why it should be viewed with scepticism rather than sentimentality. Democracy cannot be reduced to polling stations guarded by soldiers, nor can it flourish when elites reserve the right to choose the chooser. Universal suffrage is not merely a technical reform; it is a wager that citizens, not clans or patrons, should ultimately arbitrate power.


Somalia deserves that chance. But unless its leaders are willing to relinquish some control and unless foreign sponsors stop treating the country as a security project rather than a political community, the ballot box risks becoming yet another prop in a long-running charade. 


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