Talk to him long enough, though, and the contradiction stops feeling like one. The humour isn't a mask he takes off to be serious. It's the same instinct, pointed in a different direction — a genuine, rooted interest in people, in how they actually behave, in the specific and slightly ridiculous ways real conversations go, which is exactly the raw material a film about identity needs. You don't build a convincing political-identity crisis by taking politics seriously. You build it by taking people seriously, and Aagnik, whatever else he is, is someone who is paying very close attention to the people in front of him, even mid-joke.

That's arguably the whole appeal of him as a director for this particular subject. A premise this heavy could easily have gone the route of a lecture disguised as a film — earnest, message-first, the kind of thing you respect more than you actually enjoy watching. Aagnik's instinct runs the other way. He wants you laughing in a scene right before the ground shifts under you. That contrast, once you clock it, is basically the whole tonal fingerprint of the project.

PART ONE

It Started as a Documentary About His Nanaji

This film didn't start as a fictional script about a generic kid finding his politics. It started as something much more personal — a documentary about Aagnik's own nanaji, a freedom fighter of his time. His grandfather is one of the film's central inspirations, and you can feel that lineage running underneath everything, even now that the project has grown well past its original documentary shape.

There's something quietly fitting about that origin. A film about a generation trying to work out its political identity, seeded by a man who fought, quite literally, to define what the country's political identity would even be. Aagnik didn't set out to make a message film about that connection — but talk to him about his nanaji for more than a minute and it's obvious the whole project is, in some way, still that conversation, just carried forward into a different medium and a different era of the same underlying question: what do you actually stand for, and where did that come from?

It's worth sitting with that shift for a second — documentary to fiction. A documentary about a freedom fighter would have been a film about certainty: a man who knew exactly what he was fighting for, and why. What Aagnik ended up making instead is almost the inverse of that — a film about a generation that inherited the right to have politics without necessarily inheriting the clarity that used to come with it. His nanaji fought for a country. His film is about a kid trying to work out what he's fighting for, if anything, in a country that already exists. That gap between the two generations is doing a lot of the film's quiet, structural work, even in scenes that never mention the grandfather at all.

PART TWO

Mumbai, Capitalism, and the Politics You Don't Choose — You Arrive At

We asked Aagnik directly about his own political journey — how a person actually finds their identity, rather than just inheriting one. He didn't give us a rehearsed answer. He gave us a story.

When Aagnik first landed in Mumbai's bustling, distinctly capitalistic pace, the inequality wasn't an abstraction anymore — it was in front of him, daily, impossible to unsee. And by his own account, that firsthand exposure pushed him toward socialism. Not as an aesthetic or an online identity, but as a genuine reaction to what he was watching happen around him, the kind of politics that gets formed on the street rather than in a classroom.

Seeing the inequality firsthand is what first turned him toward socialism — before he arrived, later, at a more balanced political vision.

What makes this worth sharing isn't the specific label he landed on. It's the shape of the journey — the fact that his politics weren't handed to him fully formed, and they didn't stay fixed either. He moved from a reaction, to an ideology, to something more considered. First response to a system, then a name for that response, then, eventually, enough distance from the initial shock to hold a more balanced view without abandoning the instinct that got him there in the first place.

And that's exactly the story Aagnik wants to put in front of his audience: not a lesson in what to believe, but a demonstration of how belief is actually built — especially now, in a period of genuine economic and political uncertainty, where a lot of young people are having some version of this exact experience without anyone narrating it back to them. Most of us don't get handed our politics in a single, clean moment of conviction. We get handed a city, a commute, a paycheck that doesn't stretch as far as it should, and we build the rest from there, in real time, usually without realizing that's what we're doing until much later. Aagnik just happens to remember exactly when it started for him, and thought it was worth putting on screen.

PART THREE

A Raw, Classic Kind of Filmmaker

Spend enough time with Aagnik and a clearer picture forms: a raw, almost old-fashioned kind of storyteller, someone who wants to actually feel and share things through the craft rather than perform having feelings about it. Film, for him, isn't a career move — it's the chosen language for saying the things he'd otherwise have to say directly, which, given how funny he is in conversation, is probably a relief for everyone involved. It's easier to hide sincerity inside a scene than inside a sentence, and Aagnik seems to know that instinctively.

That instinct shows up clearly in how he talks about the medium itself. Aagnik is, unmistakably, a movie nerd — Ritwik Ghatak sits right at the top of his list, which tells you something on its own. Ghatak built entire careers out of exactly the kind of restraint Aagnik is aiming for here: enormous emotional and political weight, delivered through small, specific, human moments instead of speeches. The recommendations he hands to aspiring filmmakers read less like a syllabus and more like a personal map of what shaped him:

— Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-Capped Star)

— Following

— Tahader Katha

— Herbert

— Court

— Putul Nacher Itikatha (The Puppet's Tale)

— Death in the Gunj

It's a list heavy on quiet, character-driven Indian cinema, with a couple of sharp outliers — which, honestly, tracks. Nearly every title on there deals in slow-burn, interior conflict rather than plot-driven spectacle: people quietly coming apart, or quietly holding themselves together, under pressures that are more social and political than personal. That's not a coincidence for a director whose own film is trying to do exactly that with a kid, a taxi ride, and a temple scene.

PART FOUR

Why This, Why Now

It would have been easy for Aagnik to make a smaller film. Funny people with a personal family story often do — a warm, crowd-pleasing tribute to a grandfather, low stakes, easy to sell. Instead, he took the emotional core of that story and pointed it at one of the hardest, least commercial subjects available: how a young person actually builds a political identity, in a moment when doing so has never felt more exhausting or more necessary.

That's the part of Aagnik that's easy to miss if you only clock the humour first. Underneath the jokes is someone who clearly thinks this generation deserves a more honest account of how identity actually gets built — messier, slower, and far less certain than the finished version anyone presents once they've arrived somewhere. Not a call to arms. Not a verdict on what young people should believe. Just an accurate, lived-in account of the process, coming from someone who went through it himself and still remembers exactly where it started.

This is the second of two pieces on the people behind this film — read the first, on composer Ashish Chatterjee and the score built around a single word: nuance.