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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.

Opportunistic Embrace

Correspondent
Nov 19, 2025
3 min read

Trump’s lavish welcome for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman lays bare a US–Saudi partnership driven by deals in billions of dollars and a blind eye to murder.

President Donald Trump meets Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office of the White House on Tuesday.
President Donald Trump meets Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office of the White House on Tuesday.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s return to Washington this week - his first since Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in 2018 - was choreographed with all the extravagance of a state visit. President Donald Trump welcomed him to the White House with military trimmings, smiles and a flourish of flags. It was, in every sense, a political theatre of indulgence as Saudi Arabia and the United States renewed an alliance rooted less in shared values than in a frank, transactional opportunism.


The Crown Prince arrived armed with eye-catching promises. Saudi investment in the United States, he announced, would jump from $600bn to nearly $1trn - an extraordinary pledge at a moment when America is hungry for foreign capital. The two sides are also preparing agreements spanning defence, nuclear energy and a high-profile purchase of US-made F-35 fighter jets. The White House under Trump’s second term is eager to present this as proof of revitalised American leadership and economic clout. Riyadh sees it as a way to expand influence in Washington while diversifying its own strategic dependencies.


But awkward moments ensued when reporters pressed the Crown Prince on the most sensitive scars in the relationship: the 9/11 attacks and the 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. MBS insisted, as he has done for years, that Osama bin Laden, himself a Saudi national, intended the September 11th attacks to rupture US-Saudi relations, and that anyone questioning Riyadh’s commitment to counterterrorism was helping to fulfil bin Laden’s goal. The families of victims, furious at his presence in the Oval Office, were unmoved. America’s intelligence agencies, too, have been clear that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, and the kingdom’s export of extremist ideology in earlier decades created fertile ground for bin Laden’s rise.


On Khashoggi, the Crown Prince offered little beyond familiar denials. More extraordinary was Trump’s intervention. Sitting beside MBS, the president dismissed the CIA’s 2018 conclusion that the Crown Prince personally ordered the journalist’s murder. Khashoggi, Trump airily declared, had been “extremely controversial.” “Things happen,” he added, absolving his guest with a shrug that would have been unthinkable for any previous American president.


But the logic underpinning this performance was entirely consistent. For Trump, the opportunist salesman, the moral cost of overlooking a murder is outweighed by the prospect of lucrative business. Saudi Arabia already holds significant investments in the Trump family’s orbit, including the $2bn handed by Riyadh’s sovereign wealth fund to Jared Kushner’s private equity firm. A Trump Tower and a Trump Plaza are planned for Jeddah; two more projects are scheduled for Riyadh.


For MBS, the United States remains the indispensable security provider in the Gulf, the backbone of the Saudi military and the political guarantor Riyadh turns to in moments of regional crisis. By dangling vast investments and weapons deals before an American president keen to claim economic victories, MBS can demand concessions while signalling that Saudi Arabia has alternatives from Chinese investment to Russian coordination on oil markets.


The geopolitical context makes the embrace even more revealing. In the past, the United States has tolerated Saudi excesses from the oil embargo of 1973 to decades of Wahhabi proselytisation. The Middle East is again in flux: wars in Gaza and Yemen, shifting alignments in the Gulf and a global scramble for energy security. Washington needs stable partners as it focuses more of its attention on Asia. Riyadh wants strategic autonomy while still benefiting from America’s military umbrella. The result is a relationship in which both sides privately distrust each other, yet publicly cling to the fiction of strategic harmony.


The opportunism that sustains the US-Saudi alliance may be unseemly, but it offers flexibility in an unstable world. What neither side can admit openly is that this flexibility is precisely what makes the partnership both resilient and perpetually fragile - a bargain held together by a mutual willingness to look away when inconvenient truths intrude.

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