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“We have reached a time when we must open warfare on mediocrity, greyness and lack of expressiveness and make creative inquiry a rule in cinema.” His oeuvre rests on this simple rule, which lies framed in his study. On the wall opposite is a poster with a pigeon nesting on tangled strips of film. And for Buddhadeb Dasgupta, too, his concerns zoom through the mesh of life to explore the inexorable truth of life and living. But, as Dasgupta himself says, “If creative inquiry is a rule for cinema...

From guns to roses, it has been one long haul for the flint-hearted man. His on-screen, granite-faced, monosyllabic tough guy persona once prompted a critic to assign him to the Mount Rushmore school of acting. As a producer-director, they said, he could not think beyond his guns. So when he mused aloud, “I just do my thing… eventually you do something that someone thinks is okay,” cinema savants did not give it a penny’s thought. But this turned out to be one Cassandra’s prophecy when the US...