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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.

Elite Impunity

Correspondent
Dec 18, 2025
3 min read

The Epstein files test whether Donald Trump will confront the machinery of power or quietly manage it.

Jeffrey Epstein’s afterlife is being managed with care. The latest disclosure in form of 19 photographs from Epstein’s estate with faces blacked out and meaning suspended, serves as a reminder that the real test lies ahead, when the state must decide how much of the truth it is prepared to tolerate.


What matters is not whether Americans will once again gawp at images of presidents, princes and plutocrats orbiting a disgraced financier. It is whether America will finally show that power does not still buy silence.


For President Donald Trump, the Epstein files arrive as a moral and institutional reckoning that exposes the limits of his populist claim to be a scourge of elites. The president has long insisted that Epstein’s scandal proves how a decadent liberal establishment protects its own.


Epstein’s notoriety never rested on secrecy. Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, Larry Summers and a parade of tycoons, academics and political fixers have long been associated with him. Most deny wrongdoing; some have suffered reputational damage; a few have been formally disgraced. Yet the central mystery has endured since Epstein secured his astonishingly lenient plea deal in 2008: how did a man accused of trafficking underage girls operate for decades while the institutions meant to restrain him repeatedly failed?


The forthcoming release of the so-called Epstein files, compelled by Congress and reluctantly accepted by the Trump administration, promises answers. It may expose prosecutorial hesitation, investigative blind spots and the internal correspondence that explains why leads went cold. Survivors are hoping for recognition, but hopes of a neat reckoning are misplaced. Bureaucratic truth rarely arrives with drama.


That is precisely the risk. Transparency laws can be obeyed while being hollowed out. The Justice Department retains wide latitude to redact material in the name of victim protection, ongoing investigations or national security. These limits are also the traditional refuge of embarrassment disguised as caution.


The politics surrounding the disclosure are tawdry. Republicans once cast Epstein as proof that liberal elites were shielded by a corrupt establishment. Democrats now deploy selective releases to pressure a Republican administration that initially dismissed the affair as a partisan hoax. President Trump’s own oscillation - from derision to reluctant compliance - underscores the problem. When transparency becomes a weapon rather than a principle, justice becomes collateral damage.


The photographs themselves symbolise this confusion. Devoid of captions or chronology, they invite insinuation without explanation. They satisfy public appetite for spectacle while postponing understanding. Publishing them may bruise reputations, but it does little to answer the harder questions: who enabled Epstein financially, who smoothed his path with prosecutors, and why federal agencies failed to connect evidence already in their possession?


The deeper scandal is structural. Epstein thrived not merely because he was rich, but because he understood access. He connected donors to politicians, academics to patrons, social climbers to gatekeepers.


His death in custody in 2019, ruled a suicide amid extraordinary security failures, removed the central defendant while intensifying public mistrust. It ensured that the reckoning would shift from criminal guilt to institutional failure. If the forthcoming disclosures merely confirm that mistakes were made and procedures misunderstood, they will entrench the belief that justice bends towards status.


For Trump, the danger is not legal exposure but moral contradiction. He rose by railing against elite impunity, promising to smash closed systems. Yet as President, he now presides over the management of disclosure, deciding how much sunlight the public is allowed. Heavy redactions will be read as proof that the system remains intact and that Trump chose to administer it rather than dismantle it.


In the long view, the Epstein files will mark a revealing moment in Trump’s presidency. They will be remembered less for what they uncovered than for what remained obscured. Epstein’s empire flourished on silence, ambiguity and institutional reluctance. Whether those habits finally end or are merely refined will define not just this scandal, but the credibility of power itself.


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