top of page

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.

Northern Sentinels

Correspondent
Dec 5, 2025
3 min read

A Cold War–style naval partnership returns to the North Atlantic, as Britain and Norway prepare to guard the arteries of the modern world from a resurgent Russia.

The recent Lunna House pact between Britain and Norway is a telling marker of how Europe’s northern flank is being quietly remilitarised by necessity amid the steady shadow of Russia’s submarines.


The deal allows the Royal Navy and the Royal Norwegian Navy to operate a joint fleet of British-built Type-26 frigates, among the most advanced submarine-hunters afloat. Officially, the mission is to protect critical undersea cables and monitor naval movements across the long arc of water stretching from Greenland past Iceland to Britain (the famous GIUK gap that once obsessed Cold War planners.) Its unambiguous aim is to make life harder for Moscow’s increasingly visible maritime presence in northern Europe.


The choice of name is no sentimental flourish. Lunna House, in the Shetland Isles, served as a clandestine base for the Norwegian resistance during the Second World War, a quiet outpost in the struggle against Nazi occupation. By invoking it now, Britain and Norway are placing their new naval arrangement within a lineage of northern vigilance against continental threats - first German, now Russian.


Undersea cables have become the world’s most delicate arteries. More than 95 percent of global internet traffic flows through them. Financial systems, energy networks, military communications and everyday commerce depend on glass fibres barely thicker than a garden hose. Russia, whose navy never fully recovered from the Soviet collapse, has made asymmetric disruption a strategic calling card.


The British Ministry of Defence reports a 30 percent rise in Russian vessels sighted in UK waters over the past two years. Moscow protests that its ships are merely exercising their rights in international waters. Western officials are unconvinced.


During the Cold War, the North Atlantic was the primary arena for Soviet attempts to break into the open ocean through the narrow sea lanes between Greenland, Iceland and Britain. NATO built an elaborate system of sonar arrays, patrol aircraft and escort fleets to bottle up Soviet submarines before they could threaten transatlantic shipping or loom beneath American cities. That system decayed after 1991, casualties of peace dividends and shrinking budgets. The oceans were meant to be boring again.


They are not. Russia’s modern navy is smaller than its Soviet predecessor but no less determined. Its submarines are quieter; its doctrine more elastic. Rather than seeking fleet-to-fleet confrontation, Moscow probes for vulnerabilities like energy pipelines, wind farms, data cables whose destruction would paralyse societies without firing a missile. The Baltic pipeline explosions of 2022 were a brutal demonstration of what sabotage beneath the waves can achieve, even when the perpetrator remains officially unknown.


Against this background, the UK–Norway pact looks less like a bilateral curiosity than a down payment on a rebuilt northern NATO. The agreement rests on a £10bn warship deal under which Oslo will buy five Type-26 frigates from Britain’s BAE Systems, built in Glasgow. Combined with eight British vessels, the two navies will field at least 13 specialised anti-submarine hunters operating as a single force. For Britain, the arrangement flatters its self-image as a serious maritime power after Brexit. For Norway, whose vast offshore energy infrastructure makes it uniquely vulnerable, it is an exercise in survival.


Prime Minister Keir Starmer has framed the pact as both a security necessity and an industrial strategy, touting shipyard jobs alongside national defence. His description of Norway as an “absolutely vital member of the coalition of the willing” is equally telling.


NATO may be the formal structure, but coalitions within coalitions now do much of the work. Europe’s northern states - Britain, Norway, the Nordics and the Netherlands - are knitting themselves into tighter operational clusters, often faster than alliance bureaucracy can manage.


For Russia, a  joint Anglo-Norwegian fleet patrolling the approaches to the Arctic and the Atlantic constrains its options and sharpens the sense of encirclement it already claims to feel. Yet Moscow’s own behaviour has invited exactly this response. By turning the seabed into a potential battlefield, it has forced democracies to rediscover the strategic importance of waters they once took for granted.

Comments

bottom of page