India, Aug. 15 -- Continued from p 01 The research for the film also introduced Raina to details about Partition that he says he had never known before, including the circumstances in which the Radcliffe Line was drawn: "The Radcliffe Line [drawn by Sir Cyril Radcliffe] that we know of: I didn't know that Sir Radcliffe hadn't ever been in India before. He came here for a few weeks, and he was in his hotel room. And he had so much pressure from the higher-ups to make the line between India and Pakistan that he didn't really get to go talk to the people, understand what it means, what those areas mean, what those people are like in those places." He adds, "And for them, it was kind of just like a line that they drew. Which sounds so terrible." Raina was also struck by Lahore's cultural significance before Partition. "Lahore was such a big part of Indian culture. It was the heart of India," he says, adding that it was a hub of "culture, art, music and movies". "What Mumbai is now, the stars of that time used to stay in Lahore and everything used to come from there. And I'm thinking just that line could have changed the lives of maybe 1000s of people." Partition was not entirely absent from conversations at home either. Raina's family is from Kashmir, and while his grandparents did not experience migration at the time, he remembers hearing his grandfather speak about the political climate. "My nana used to talk about how things were, what Mahatma Gandhiji was doing, what Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehruji was doing, and what the political climate was. He is very politically aware." Asked if he has strong political views too, Raina says, "Yes, I'd say not as extreme as him." Freedom has acquired a more personal meaning for him as well. Raina recalls that finishing college and landing The Archies (2023) happened around the same time. "Now, I correlatethat azadi with movies. Maybe movies gave me that freedom," he says....