Director: Dev Benegal; Producer: Anuradha Parikh; Cinematographer: Anoop Jotwani; Cast: Rahul Bose, Salim Shah, Tanvi Azmi, Mita Vasisht
Duration: 01:47:13; Aspect Ratio: 1.314:1; Hue: 23.928; Saturation: 0.166; Lightness: 0.216; Volume: 0.146; Cuts per Minute: 9.392
Summary: Agastya, aka August (Bose), a member of
India’s urban English-speaking elite, fan of Bob
Dylan and Marcus Aurelius, arrives in the small
town of Madna, A.P., as a newly-commissioned
Indian Administrative Service bureaucrat. Much
of the largely comic film shows life in the
Indian heartland through his eyes, including
bureaucratic corruption, swaggering officials
and people such as the cynical cartoonist
Govind Sathe. This is interwoven with his own
voyeuristic fantasies and memories of life in the
big city. In the end, transferred to a Naxalite dominated
area where radicals have killed a
similarly Westernised colleague, he takes time
off to write his novel. The film begins with his
unsuccessful effort to sell the novel to
publishers. Mainly an ode to multiculturalism,
presented as generational problem. The
original novel, of the same title, was one of the
better-received items of the post-Rushdie boom
in Indo-Anglican fiction.
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