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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.

Kangaroo Justice

Correspondent
Nov 21, 2025
3 min read

Bangladesh’s unelected regime has converted the law into a blunt instrument to eliminate the pro-India Sheikh Hasina.

Bangladesh’s interim rulers have finally delivered the spectacle they seemed to crave: a death sentence for Sheikh Hasina, handed down by a tribunal whose credibility is as hollow as the government that convened it. The former Prime Minister, who is in India at present, was tried in absentia by the International Crimes Tribunal - an institution once created to prosecute the genocidal violence of 1971, now repurposed to brand as “international crimes” the actions of an elected leader confronting violent mobs on her own soil. The re-engineering of this court says less about Hasina’s conduct than about the ambitions of the unelected clique now running the country.


Bangladesh today does not have a legitimate government. It has an interim administration with no constitutional footing, led by Muhammad Yunus, a man parachuted into office with the blessing of foreign patrons, notably in Washington. This regime has now pushed through a trial designed to erase Hasina, her party and the political legacy of Bangladesh’s liberation.


The charges against her strain coherence. The violence in question which included street rioting, arson, and mob assaults in the final days before Hasina’s ouster was domestic. There were no external actors, no cross-border operations, no semblance of the international dimension for which the tribunal was conceived. The court’s original purpose was to prosecute the atrocities committed by the Pakistan army and its collaborators in 1971. To place Hasina’s actions in the same category is to trivialise the genocide that created Bangladesh.


The mobs that overran Dhaka in those chaotic weeks targeted more than Hasina. They burned symbols of the country’s founding, vandalised tributes to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and assaulted courts, forcing judges to resign under threat. Against this backdrop, the tribunal’s composition and its sudden appetite for severity inspire little confidence. A bench formed in an atmosphere of intimidation cannot claim to represent impartial justice.


The larger aim appears to be to crush the Awami League before next year’s elections. The party, which commands deep social roots and historic legitimacy, is inconvenient for a junta trying to consolidate power without a popular mandate. De-legitimising Hasina through a capital sentence is an attempt to delegitimise the movement she leads. Any election held without the Awami League would disenfranchise millions.


This political purge coincides with Dhaka’s sharp turn away from India and towards Pakistan. Yunus and his circle have unfurled a foreign policy that flatters Islamabad and indulges Jamaat-e-Islami, the party that sided with the Pakistani army during the liberation struggle and has long nurtured hostility towards India. Jamaat’s sudden policy influence helps explain why anti-India sentiment has surged. Yunus, too, has played to this gallery.


If Hasina were truly the war criminal the tribunal now claims, it is hard to fathom why Bangladesh’s army chief would have personally flown her out of Dhaka to prevent mob violence against her. His actions would themselves demand scrutiny. Yet the interim leadership pretends not to notice this contradiction. Instead, Yunus boasts on global stages that the uprising against Hasina was “meticulously designed,” even introducing the supposed architect of the “student movement” that toppled her.


The government’s diplomatic posture is equally brazen. Knowing full well that India will not extradite a political rival facing a death sentence, Dhaka has sought to raise the temperature. Officials now claim that extradition is a “mandatory duty” under the bilateral treaty, threatening that India’s refusal to hand her over would constitute an “act of enmity” against Bangladesh.


The extradition treaty explicitly allows India to refuse requests of a political character, or those made in bad faith. Both conditions apply in abundance. Nor will Indian courts ignore that a death sentence makes extradition all but impossible. Economic offenders and terrorists from Western countries often evade deportation for years; Dhaka’s expectation that New Delhi will promptly surrender an ex-prime minister condemned by a tainted tribunal is wilfully unrealistic.


India’s response has been restrained thus far. India has avoided endorsing the verdict - not least because it reeks of political vengeance but its cautiously worded statement leaves room for firmer positions ahead.


Bangladesh’s interim rulers may believe they can stabilise the country by eliminating the Awami League. More likely, they have planted the seeds of a legitimacy crisis from which the country will struggle to recover.

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