Mumbai, July 15 -- Aanand L Rai has always let his stories lead the way. And that's probably why, all of his characters tell the absolute truth about human beings. And that truth looks nothing like the romance Indian cinema had been packaging for decades. No perfect unions, no destiny-approved matches, no heroines who exist purely to be chosen. Just contradictory, stubborn, impulsive individuals who love badly and completely, in ways that make you recognise something of yourself even when their choices make you wince. That specificity is what gradually and quietly turned him into the most essential voice in contemporary Hindi romance.

What separates his filmography from anything else working in this space is that no two films occupied th...