A Peek Into What's Keeping Anurag Kashyap Busy!

As Anurag Kashyap turns 47 next month, he will still provoke—as a filmmaker and writer, but no longer on Twitter.

- Rajiv Singh

Moviemaking is like an expensive form of therapy. Only you don’t have to pay for it. Other people pay for it. Filmmaker Tim Burton

For Anurag Kashyap, the therapy continues more than 15 years after he made his first movie that never got released in India, Paanch. The film ran into problems with the censor board, which couldn’t figure why the filmmaker insisted on making dark cinema that glorified violence and drugs instead of ‘wholesome and healthy entertainment’. The film, inspired by the gruesome murders of the Joshi and Abhyankar families in Pune in the 70s, was eventually screened at festivals in Hamburg and Los Angeles, among other cities.

Two decades later, Kashyap—along with a rash of filmmakers, writers and producers, and an eager audience—has embraced a new platform that has so far eluded the scissors of the censors: Over-the-top (OTT) video streaming. And in an impish blast from the past, Kashyap has brought back one of the provocative bits from the Paanch era into the second season of the Sacred Games original web series that premiered on August 15: A masturbation scene. Kashyap didn’t reveal more when Forbes India met him in end-July, but did let on: “There are things (in Sacred Games 2) that are going to provoke.”

On the cusp of his 47th birthday on September 10, Kashyap will continue to provoke—but not on Twitter any longer, where till recently he would forcefully put forth his views (threats to his family and his daughter compelled him to quit the microblogging platform). Now it will be his films and scripts that will do most of the talking. And there is a difference from the past; now he won’t tilt at every windmill along the way, the way he did when films like No Smoking (2007) and