There’s a particular kind of silence that follows a big, noisy blockbuster these days. It’s not awe, nor satisfaction, just a faint hollowness. Crowds spill out of theatres still buzzing with the aftershocks of films like Animal, Baaghi 4, Tere Ishq Mein with its stalker-as-lover template, or the newly minted Dhurandhar, where jingoism and pulverised bodies do most of the talking. The sound fades, but nothing stays. No moment that feels borrowed from real life, no line that follows you home.
That ache bothering you inside is what filmmaker Aditya Kripalani recently articulated in a post on Instagram. A longing for stories about the things people actually wrestle with — the cost of surviving a city, the courage it takes to dream, the clumsy ways we love our parents, siblings, and partners. Stories about failing, trying again, and returning home with some small piece of clarity. “I feel I’m unable to bring anything back home from the theatre anymore,” he wrote. The takeaway has vanished.

And it leaves behind the question of what happens when a country’s most popular cinema stops reflecting the emotional landscape of the people watching it?
For someone like Abhinav Jha, the theatre used to feel like a second home. He’s 23, a filmmaker who grew up pirating obscure world cinema as a teenager, spending weekends in dark auditoriums with his parents, and later working on ad sets between his freelancing. “Filmmaking and watching cinema is part of my daily routine,” he says — a line that, in another time, would announce a lifetime of loyalty to the big screen.