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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.

Unfinished War

Correspondent
Dec 31, 2025
3 min read

America’s strikes on Islamic State militants reveal a country fracturing anew under the weight of history, sectarian fear and geopolitical neglect.

A year after the fall of Bashar al-Assad and half a decade after the Islamic State lost its caliphate, American forces are still hunting jihadists across Syria. The killing or capture of roughly 25 ISIL operatives over the past few days, that was triggered by the deaths of two American soldiers and a civilian interpreter, was presented as a counterterrorism effort. It was also an admission that Syria remains too broken to be left alone.


That reality is awkward for Washington. The American military presence, now about 1,000 troops, was meant to shrink as attention shifted elsewhere. Instead, it persists because the conditions that allowed ISIL to flourish have not disappeared.


The Islamic State’s caliphate was territorially crushed by 2019. Yet its survival, in skeletal but lethal form, speaks to a deeper failure of Syria’s inability to knit itself back together after 14 years of civil war. ISIL thrives not because it is strong, but because the state around it is weak, divided and contested. America’s continuing presence, now roughly 1,000 troops, down from double that at the height of the campaign, exists less to defeat the group than to prevent its reconstitution amid chaos.


That chaos is no longer confined to Syria’s eastern badlands. Along the Mediterranean coast, in Latakia and Tartous, sectarian tensions have returned with a vengeance. Protests by members of the Alawite minority, triggered by the bombing of an Alawite mosque in Homs, reflect a growing fear that the community which once monopolised power is now dangerously exposed. The attack, claimed by an obscure Sunni extremist group, echoed earlier atrocities, including a suicide bombing of a Damascus church. Syria’s minorities, once sheltered cynically by Assad’s police state, now face the perils of freedom without guarantees.


Calls by Alawite figures abroad for federalism and communal self-determination may sound abstract, but they tap into a raw historical memory. The modern Syrian state was stitched together by French colonial administrators who bundled sects and regions into an artificial whole. Assad’s regime held it together through fear, patronage and repression. Its collapse did not resolve Syria’s contradictions; it merely exposed them.


The interim government that replaced Assad has inherited a poisoned chalice. It must contend simultaneously with jihadist remnants, Kurdish militias wary of central authority, Israeli incursions in the south, and now sectarian unrest along the coast. Sporadic clashes between government forces and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces underline the fragility of the post-Assad settlement. America, long allied with the SDF, now finds itself balancing counterterrorism cooperation with a desire to normalise relations with Damascus.


That balancing act is complicated further by geopolitics beyond Syria’s borders. Israel has expanded its footprint beyond the Golan Heights, establishing checkpoints and conducting raids that Damascus decries as occupation. Donald Trump, having lifted sanctions on Syria and publicly praised its new president as a “strong guy” while urging Israel to “get along” with its neighbour. Such remarks reflect Washington’s broader fatigue with Middle Eastern entanglements.


Indeed, the timing of America’s latest military campaign is telling. It came just as Washington signalled its intention to shift strategic focus away from the Middle East towards the Western Hemisphere. Syria, like Iraq before it, has a way of defying such pivots. The killing of three Americans was a sharp reminder that disengagement does not immunise distant powers from local disorder.


The deeper problem is that no external actor has a coherent vision for Syria’s political future. The defeat of ISIL removed a common enemy, not a shared purpose. What followed was a scramble for influence rather than reconstruction. Without inclusive institutions and economic revival, Syria’s interim rulers risk presiding over a hollow peace.


For now, American airstrikes may thin the ranks of ISIL. They will not, however, address the grievances that sustain militancy or the sectarian wounds reopening along Syria’s coast. History suggests that states emerging from long civil wars rarely fail all at once. Syria’s war, it seems, has merely changed its shape. 


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