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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.

Politics of Clemency

Correspondent
Dec 3, 2025
3 min read

Benjamin Netanyahu’s bid for clemency tests Israel’s rule of law and entangles Gaza, Syria and Washington in a perilous political bargain.

Presidential pardons have long been a lubricant of American politics, applied with weary regularity at the end of administrations. In Israel, by contrast, clemency is rare, freighted with moral meaning and constitutional consequence. That is what makes Benjamin Netanyahu’s formal request for a pardon from President Isaac Herzog so seismic. It is not merely a legal manoeuvre but a bid to rewrite the story of a decade of polarising rule under the shadow of war.


For more than five years, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister has been defending himself in court against charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Even after the Hamas attacks and the devastating war that followed, Netanyahu continued to appear in court, sometimes three times a week. His letter to President Herzog marks a sharp turn. Though insisting on his personal innocence, he now argues that the country itself must “move on.”


For his supporters, the appeal is an act of national closure after years of institutional trench warfare between the executive and the judiciary. For his critics, it is a dark attempt by a wounded strongman to place himself above the law. The fact that he is seeking mercy rather than vindication sharpens the unease.


What lifts the drama from domestic scandal to geopolitical intrigue is Washington’s sudden proximity to the process. During a recent phone call with America’s president, Donald Trump, Netanyahu reportedly sought continued help in nudging Herzog towards clemency. Trump, who publicly called for a pardon during a Knesset address and followed it up with a letter to Israel’s president, now sounds more equivocal.


That ambiguity reflects a broader recalibration. The same call focused heavily on Gaza and Syria - arenas where Trump appears eager to dampen Israeli escalation. In Gaza, America’s president has pressed Netanyahu to soften his approach, even as Israel insists on Hamas’s disarmament as the price of any broader settlement. A recent Israeli proposal would have allowed Hamas operatives to emerge from tunnels on condition of surrender and imprisonment. They refused. The survivors are now thought to be starving underground, their operational freedom shrinking alongside their calories.


On Syria, the message from Washington was to take it easy. With a new Islamist-led leadership in Damascus seeking tenuous international legitimacy after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, Trump has warned Israel against destabilising the transition. He has even floated the idea of a security pact between former enemies. Netanyahu, who until recently spoke in the language of deterrence and preventive strikes, has suddenly discovered the vocabulary of restraint. An agreement, he hinted, might be possible.


The coincidence of these shifts invites an uncomfortable question: is Netanyahu’s legal fate becoming entangled with Israel’s strategic posture? The suspicion, voiced quietly in Jerusalem’s legal and security circles, is that a pardon might become part of a larger transactional logic of de-escalation abroad in exchange for political salvation at home.


Granting the pardon would spare Israel months, perhaps years, of corrosive courtroom drama. But it would also confirm the darkest fears of the protesters who filled the streets long before the war that power ultimately shields itself. The precedent would be lethal.


Nor would the international consequences be trivial. A pardoned Netanyahu would emerge politically weakened but legally unbound. At a moment when Israel seeks to expand the circle of Arab normalisation after the Abraham Accords, the symbolism of forgiving a leader convicted, formally or informally, of corruption would sit awkwardly with the promise of institutional reform in the region.


There is also America’s role to consider. Trump’s advocacy places Washington uncomfortably close to Israel’s domestic legal machinery. The United States has long prided itself on non-interference in the internal judicial affairs of allies. A president lobbying for clemency for a leader with whom he enjoys ideological affinity blurs that boundary.


A pardon for Netanyahu might bring procedural closure. It would not bring moral peace. And if it is seen to have been brokered under the long shadow of Gaza and Syria, it may leave Israel’s institutions looking compromised.

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