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2020 was especially cruel to our entertainment industry. One by one, we lost Irrfan Khan, Rishi Kapoor, (music composer) Wajid Khan, Basu Chatterjee, Sushant Singh Rajput, Saroj Khan, Jagdeep, S. P Balasubramaniam, Soumitra Chatterjee, and Nishikant Kamat.

Nishikant Kamat’s going; I took it personally. Though I had never met him, we shared a certain bonding. Whenever he called, he would speak in that soft, respectful voice and tell me that I should not mind if he doesn’t respond to my messages immediately as he travelled a lot.

I first reached out to Nishikant after I saw his directorial debut, that exceptional Marathi film Dombivali West in 2005, which was quickly remade into Tamil as Evano Oruvan with Madhavan in the lead. Nishikant quickly became a successful director in Bollywood. But he hardly had any friends in the Mumbai film industry except John Abraham, with whom he did the successful Force and Rocky Handsome.

Indian action movies offer high-octane thrills and charismatic stars like John Abraham in Rocky Handsome. Kill blends intense action with gripping drama as a commando takes on knife-wielding thugs on a train. Rrr is a global hit that impressed Hollywood directors and even won an Academy Award for Best Song.

Plenty of action movie lovers have unknowingly limited themselves to simply watching Hollywood or English-language productions, but this failed to recognize the litany of incredible Indian action movies just waiting to be discovered. With plenty of high-octane action and charismatic movie stars, Indian cinema has been responsible for some of the best action movies in recent years. While theres a lot of cultural disparity between different regions of India, there have been countless Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, and other language Indian movies that would truly blow away action fans with their incredible spectacle.

While the best Bollywood movies can sometimes feel...

Rocky Handsome

Starring: John Abraham, Nishikant Kamat, Nathalia Kaur, Diya Chalwad, Sharad Kelkar

Directed by: Nishikant Kamat

Rating: ****(4 stars)

Is John Abraham’s Kabir Ahlawat, alias Rocky, alias Nowhere Man the finest performance of his career so far? Well, yes. It would have to be a toss-up between Shoojit Sircar’s excellent political thiller Madras Café and now Nishikant Kamat’s Rocky Handsome.

It is unequivocally evident from the start of this dark gripping thriller about damnation and tentative redemption that Kamat is a director who understands John’s physicality as well as his emotional strengths. Kamat uses both the qualities to create a man doddering on the edge of self-destruction. At mid-point when John in shirtless splendour is required to display his heroic swagger by a camera that loves beauty as much the ugliness of existence, we know what Rocky doesn’t.

Heroes are born out of necessity.

Kabir...

Teddy Maurya, the production designer of Chalo Dilli, has earlier acted in two of his films which he production designed too, Jab We Met and Love Aaj Kal. He was approached by director Shashant for the role of 'Bhaiyaji' but refused since there was a lot in his plate as a Production Designer already. Teddy remained unmoved till four days before the shoot when the director decided to cash in on his weak nerve. The moment Teddy found out that Yana Gupta was doing the number, he Read More...

Teddy Maurya, the production designer of Chalo Dilli, has earlier acted in two of his films which he production designed too, Jab We Met and Love Aaj Kal. He was approached by director Shashant for the role of 'Bhaiyaji' but refused since there was a lot in his plate as a Production Designer already. Teddy remained unmoved till four days before the shoot when the director decided to cash in on his weak nerve. The moment Teddy found out that Yana Gupta was doing the number, he...