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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.

Institutional Rot

Correspondent
Feb 19
3 min read

The plight of Pakistan’s hockey players exposes a country obsessed with reputation at the cost of institutional decay.

Pakistan's latest embarrassment concerns its national hockey players, who were recently compelled to turn whistleblowers after administrative chaos left them stranded without accommodation during an official tour of Australia.


What began as a viral video of athletes standing on the streets of Sydney with their luggage quickly caused a political embarrassment in Islamabad—and revealed, once again, a country where mismanagement and corruption are not episodic failures but emblematic features of governance.


The scandal forced Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to order an inquiry into the Pakistan Hockey Federation (of which he himself is a patron of), after it emerged that funds had been released for hotel bookings that were never paid for. Players reportedly waited over 13 hours in transit, arrived at hotels with no reservations, and were left to wander the streets before makeshift arrangements were made


Pakistan’s national sport, once a source of global awe, had been reduced to a case study in how a state mismanages even its most basic obligations.


The details are humiliating. Players allegedly waited more than half a day at airports, arrived at hotels that had not been paid for, and were left to roam the streets before accommodation was scrambled together. The team, physically drained and mentally frayed, lost every match.


The eruption of the scandal had a whiff of black comedy to it. After publicly criticising the Pakistan Hockey Federation, the team captain promptly released another video claiming that everything was fine. But back in Lahore, he admitted the truth - the reassurance had been a lie, a “cover-up” designed in order to “maintain Pakistan’s reputation in India.”


That confession says more about the modern Pakistani state than any white paper or IMF report. A country whose economy is in tatters, whose institutions rot from within and whose writ barely extends beyond its own press conferences is still obsessively concerned about what Indians might think while exporting violence across the border with a straight face.


This reflex to suppress reality rather than confront it is Pakistan’s defining pathology. From airlines to energy utilities, from sports bodies to civil administration, dysfunction in Pakistan is the name of the system.


Sharif’s predictable response has been to order an inquiry and issue sombre statements. Pakistan is littered with the paperwork of past inquiries. What it lacks is enforcement. The same federations limp on and the same decay is repackaged as misfortune.


The collapse of hockey is especially telling. Pakistan once dominated the sport through discipline, organisation and depth. Its decline mirrors the erosion of state capacity itself. Administrators are now appointed through patronage, not competence while federations operate as fiefdoms. Athletes are expected to perform internationally while being treated domestically as inconveniences. That players were allegedly washing dishes before matches is emblematic of the decline.


What makes the episode darker is the logic that justified the lie. The truth, the captain said, would damage Pakistan’s reputation abroad. This anxiety about appearances runs deep. Pakistan’s elite remains fixated on how the country is perceived, while showing far less concern for how it actually functions.


That obsession has consequences well beyond sport. Instead of building institutions, the state polices narratives. Instead of fixing delivery, it manages denial. Failure is explained away as sabotage, conspiracy or misunderstanding. The result is a culture in which telling the truth becomes an act of disloyalty, and exposing mismanagement is treated as betrayal.


While fretting over reputational slights, Pakistan’s conduct routinely ensures reputational damage on a far grander scale. Its economy survives on bailouts. Its institutions stagger from crisis to crisis. Its public services barely function.


A country that cannot house its own athletes abroad but manages to shelter extremists at home cannot plausibly complain about misunderstanding or prejudice. Pakistan’s reputation is not harmed by viral videos or hostile neighbours; it is corroded by the persistent gap between what it claims to be and what it repeatedly does. 

 


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