Winds From The East

casual appraisal of how Varma tends to assume his audiences know everything beforehand, and much like a bad storyteller who cannot wait to tell you about the twist in the tale without setting it up first, he is essentially making films only he can enjoy. Varma is often believed to have triggered some sort of a revolution in terms of how Bollywood films are made – a reputation that is largely a yield of his 1998 film Satya. His frequent complaint is that a lot of the writers on his films, or even his audiences, tend to compare whichever of his efforts is the latest to feature on the marquee with this earlier tour-de-force of a film– thereby invariably resulting in a circumstance of unbalanced and unequal comparison, where Satya will always triumph, but more importantly, his latest film will always be given the raw end of the deal. It is to Satya’s credit and some sort of a perverse ode to its endurance that a film its director makes in 2010 is still compared to a film he made in 1998...