The first film to use the technique of parallel cutting, or cross-cutting, was DW Griffiths’ Birth of A Nation, made in 1915. Parallel cutting edits back and forth between two or more sets of events that occur simultaneously, in different locations, thereby showing how they impact each other, and are linked conceptually.

A century later, India remade this American classic, not as Birth of A Nation, but close enough: Republic Day, 2015. Like nukkad nataks or Hindi films, forms which embrace life’s genuine melodrama, this movie-day too was rich with irony, running in parallel narratives like pinstripes on a suit.