Angry No More

ONCE KNOWN as Bollywood’s most volatile director, Anurag Kashyap is playing it cool. He swims 80 minutes a day, every day, to get his mind right. He has quit smoking. “The urge after food is killing, though,” he said. At 46, a bit late, he admits, he’s figured out that he doesn’t need to make the world agree with him.

- Sukant Deepak

“The moment it happened, all cobwebs vanished. I started concentrating on my work,” said Kashyap, adding that he has never been so efficient. “Look at my social media. There is much less distress, and I have stopped abusing. Now I am speaking my mind only through my work.”

With three major releases slated for the next few months, including his contribution to the Netflix anthology Lust Stories that hit the web on June 15, he’s got plenty to say.

A companion to 2013’s Bombay Talkies, Lust Stories again places a Kashyap short alongside films by Dibakar Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar and Karan Johar. It’s a departure from his preferred genre of hardboiled noir. But he’s excited to see how the audience responds, given how rapidly perceptions about love, sex and relationships are changing in the era of #MeToo.

“Let’s see how women respond to it. Take my word for it, this is by far the best work by Karan Johar and Zoya Akhtar,” he said. “What’s most interesting is that the film addresses the fact that lust is beyond just physical. The audience will get to unravel multiple layers in every story.”