On our film set everyone asks me one question: whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi will return to power in May 2019. (They assume journalists or even screenwriters have special insight, which we do not.) Such is the polarisation nowadays that just the way that someone asks will tell you whether they're pro- or anti-Modi. My standard answer: it's too early to tell.

Yes, there is increasing anger with the government because of rising prices, lack of jobs, the banking mess that stalls the economy, the fraudsters sitting pretty abroad and out of our enforcement agencies' reach, the highest GST slab rate still at 28 per cent, and above all, the whimsical November 2016 demonetisation. Voters have become so cynical that even the release of a video of the so-called surgical strike of September 2016 (I prefer to call it an extended "hot pursuit") hasn't changed any minds. Nobody even wonders why it is released so late in the day; it is assumed that the motivation is the Assembly elections later this year in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh - all BJP-ruled states where an anti-incumbency mood prevails.