Last week I watched Satyajit Ray's Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder), by way of nursing a broken heart. I was in mourning after the passing away on November 15 of Soumitra Chatterjee, the internationally acclaimed Bengali actor, on whom I had a massive crush. He played the lead in the film, along with stunning Bangladeshi actress Babita. Ray, who made the film in 1973, shows us the impact of the manmade Bengal famine of 1943, in which an estimated five million died. Yet, it seems a prescient film for 2020, in which poverty and hunger are even more widespread in the midst of plenty, yet largely invisible to the government and the middle class.

Over 120 million of India's rural poor, seasonal migrants looking for work, are estimated to have walked home across entire states by foot, driven by hunger, following the ill-prepared national lockdown declared in March this year because of COVID-19. On Ashani Sanket, more anon. Mrinal Sen's Akaler Sandhane (In Search of Famine, 1971) also made us acutely aware of the hunger in rural areas; pervasive, yet invisible to middle class eyes.