Shor in the City

called Raj & DK who went from being software engineers in the US to come all the way back to India and enter the film industry made their third film where one of the scenes that’s so vividly stuck in my memory was of a young couple making out at a lover’s point in Mumbai and the girl stops kissing midway to complain how her lips are dry. With that one scene, their unique sensibilities were established and we got the quintessential Mumbai film about characters that you’ll only see in Mumbai, trying to hustle and survive in this city… A film that was low on budget but big on ideas and balanced sexiness, grime, crime, humour & karma in equal measure… A film which made us go, ‘wow Tushar Kapoor can act?’ This was also a film that made a lot of us including me crush on this woman called Radhika Apte, long before Netflix made her its postergirl Every time I listen to the evergreen Saibo from the soundtrack today I’m taken back to this golden period when Bollywood used to make these small films purely based on their unique content that found love among critics and audiences alike, something that feels like a distant dream in today’s world.