Anurag Kashyap is among the most talented writers we have in Hindi films today. Satya, Kaun, Shool, Yuva and Nayak are an eloquent testimony to his calibre as a screenplay and dialogue writer. The super success of Satya, both critical and commercial, gave Kashyap his niche in the industry starved of good writers. But luck kept eluding him with his films as director. It took him 12 years to find financial backing for his first film, Paanch. However, the brilliantly made film is still in the cans for more than one reason, not the least one being the myopic view of the censors, who thought that the film was “too stark” and projected “too much hatred”. They found it lacking in “any entertainment value”. The most amusing observation was, “it is shot in dim light which might harm the eyes” of those watching it.   Paanch is about five wannabe rock stars and their fierce, cold-blooded pursuit of success. His next, Black Friday, which turned out to be his first released film by default, was brilliant too – in fact, one the best made in a long long time. It ran into several roadblocks because of its no-holds-barred projection of the bomb blasts of 1993 that ripped apart Mumbai. The accused in the blasts wanted the film stalled. Finally, after a long-drawn legal battle, the Supreme Court cleared the film in 2007. On merit, Black Friday should have been India’s entry to the Oscars in 2007!

Anurag’s Achilles’ heel has been his die-hard convictions. He quit Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Mission Kashmir  when he was asked to rework on the script mid way through the filming, when Hrithik Roshan became an overnight star in the wake of Kaho Naa…Pyar Hai. More recently, he disowned Mani Ratnam’s Guru because he was not convinced by the “arbitrary changes” he was asked to make in the life of the protogonist halfway through the shoot. He is not apologetic about making No Smoking despite the flak it got him and its total failure at the box-office. He refuses to identify a film’s success with the money it rakes in. He has moved on to work on his ‘modern’ version of Devdas titled Dev D!