Religion is a lot like paratha, says filmmaker Anubhav Sinha. While everyone rightly claims their mothers make the best parathas in the world, you take the claim, understand the emotion it's coming from, rather than fight the other person with a counter-claim about your own mother's prowess at frying the same bread. For, there is no such thing as the best paratha. Right? Sure, just as humans hating/killing each other, for generations, over the most existentialist question that competing religions attempt to answer: Who are we? Why are we here? And where are we headed? There is no right answer. And regardless of who has the better one, what can't be disputed is that our fates are common, so is the blood that flows in our veins.

"It's the same chat that restlessly honking cars have with each other on the road," says Sinha. Each driver asserts that his journey is more important. While there have been several great films this year, doubtlessly, Sinha's Mulk (starring Rishi Kapoor, Tapsee Pannu), by way of a conversation, and the audience it is intended for, is the most relevant movie, by a mile. That it came from the director of Tum Bin and RA.One was only mildly surprising. As a young engineer who moved to Mumbai to make films, Sinha says his misplaced definition of personal success — big stars, big budgets, etc — had kept him thus far from using his medium for self-expression. The reason he made Mulk, I suspect, is because, as he puts it, the good rarely markets itself well (believing in its victory in the long run), while the bad, namely hate, is much better organised, ruthlessly sharp in its messaging.