Sometimes it takes a bad apple to understand that it doesn't really keep the doctor away. And that's the thing about rules, until someone breaks them, you don't quite understand why it is important to do so. Celebrated filmmaker Nagesh Kukunoor managed to do just that two decades ago when he made his first low-budget, no-frills romantic comedy, Hyderabad Blues.

In one way, the movie exposed Indian audiences to the world of independent films and in another, it undid some of the stitches in the fabric of Indian cinema. Think of it as darning, which is the process of interweaving the yarn to fix a hole. And the industry in India in the '90s - which was predominated by films with star-studded casts, over-the-top action sequences and glamorously shot music videos - had a gaping hole. With Hyderabad Blues, Kukunoor fixed that in a way or at least mended a part of it.