Mahajan’s handheld camera roaming in the street of Calcutta inside public vehicles or through narrow lanes with garbage heaped on the side.

Rather, I will try to concentrate on the spaces that Sen explores with K. But this essay is not an exploration of individual anxieties and their transition into reckless abandon. While Siddhartha’s serious and ideologically charged reply in Pratidwandi was “The Vietnam War”, here Ranju answers with a sheepish yet sincere smile “My interview, Sir!”. In a quirky reference Ray’s classic Pratidwandi (The Adversary) here too a board member asks the protagonist “What is the biggest event of the decade?”. The interview board members played themselves, asking questions) wearing dhoti and kurta. Finally, desperate Ranju goes appears in front of the stunned interview board ( The scene was shot in the IBM office in Calcutta, the American corporate giant had a vibrant marketing presence in the city even then. He manages to get another suit but even that one gets stolen on the bus. When Ranju goes to the laundry shop to collect his prized suit (the only one he has) he finds the shop is shut due to a laundry workers’ indefinite strike. His prospects of getting the job look very bright in the beginning but it goes downhill from there. Ranju, who comes from a lower middle class family with a widowed mother and a sister already has strong recommendation from a friend of his late father. The story, written by Ashish Burman, centred around a young unemployed man called Ranju and his futile attempts to seek a proper suit for an important job interview in a prestigious British company. Some praised the treatment and cinematography, but it received criticism from some quarters as well for being an “anti-social” film.

After the third week, with the waning enthusiasm, it was withdrawn. The film ran successfully for two weeks at Globe, one of the most prominent movie theatres in town. Sen claims in his biography that the admiring audience enthusiastically chased the cinematographer K K Mahajan, who was mobbed and subsequently rescued after begging for help in horror. Public response, however, was overwhelmingly good. There was a private screening exclusively for the press before this, where the response was rather subdued, although some critics were quite intrigued by the novelty of the subject matter and the constant interplay between fact and fiction with a surrealistic treatment of the narrative. In the middle of 1971, when the city of Calcutta according to official figures were witnessing about 200 political killings a month, Mrinal Sen released Interview in some of the prominent movie theatres in Calcutta for commercial viewing, the most prominent of all: Globe, where it ran for three weeks.

Ten Days in Calcutta by Reinhard Hauff