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Smita Singh: 'Unlike Hollywood, screenwriting here has always been director-led'

Hindustan Times

6 days ago

Entertainment
Hindustan Times

Smita Singh: 'Unlike Hollywood, screenwriting here has always been director-led'

What was your childhood like? Screenwriter Smita Singh (Courtesy the subject) My father is from Madhya Pradesh, and my mother has roots in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. My father was in the army, so I have been all over during my childhood. Growing up in the 1980s with an army background meant visiting militarized zones and travelling with people who were carrying AK-47s and guns all the time. Punjab and Kashmir are where I spent most of my childhood. As a child, I did a lot of reading and watched a lot of movies. Why and when did you think of becoming a writer? Growing up in an army unit meant that my sister and I did not go out and interact with other people much. Everyone is from a different age group and different backgrounds. Some don't have their families along. So, it was a pretty solitary childhood which created a lot of time and space for reading. Also, being articulate, being able to express myself in words, became a priority for me. I thought of getting into FTII, but it was too much – I didn't know how to do it. So, I finished my graduation from MP, which was my father's last posting, and then took up a Mass Communications course in Delhi, which I did not even finish. I did marketing jobs, back-end hotel jobs, sales – for a while, I was lost in Delhi. Then I got this job of transcribing interviews for Doordarshan, where I spent long hours going through interviews. Then I worked with Midi Tech, where we used to work on documentaries for National Geographic and Discovery. At this time, I was working in non-fiction, but I found that there were scripts online. I spent hours reading thousands of scripts, and that's when I thought this was something I wanted to do. I wanted to write for films. Then, much later in life, in 2012, I went to FTII. How did Mumbai happen? In 2006, I got married and moved to Bangalore. It was difficult to work there because I didn't know the language. So, from 2009 to 2012, I stopped working, and all I did was watch films. I turned my house into a mini film library. I would watch even the very obscure films from all over the world. I watched films and read a lot of scripts. In 2012, I felt ready to go to FTII, and I enrolled there. It was at FTII, where I developed the script for what eventually became Raat Akeli Hai. So, Tulsea, a talent management firm, came there for Campus Recruitment. Chaitanya (Hegde), who heads Tulsea, read the script and really liked it, and told me that Tulsea would like to represent me. That, for me, was a big step because I thought, now I know somebody who can introduce me to the industry. And they did it wonderfully. When I came to Bombay in 2014, Tulsea introduced me to lovely people like Shakun (Batra) and Kannu Behl. I also did a writing gig for Kannu. He discusses a lot, we talk a lot, sometimes the stories don't go anywhere, but I had a lovely time working with him. Then I also developed something with Gattu (Abhishek Kapoor). But then, about a year in, I felt that I didn't have the patience for it. I feel that I can't be someone's typist, you know. I can't be sitting there, writing down what someone is thinking. And I am pretty sure that people who worked with me realized that as well. But the writing gigs I did in my first year in Bombay did not really work out, and I got bored. Around that time, Vikram Motwayne read Raat Akeli Hai. He gave it to Anurag (Kashyap), who called to meet me. At that time, he was editing Bombay Velvet. He really liked the script and told me that he wanted to make it, but then again, a year went past like that, and nothing happened. Then my script got selected for Mumbai Mantra, and I had to pitch it to 70 producers, which was part of the deal of the Mumbai Mantra thing. That's where Honey Trehan read the script and liked it. So, I sold the script to Honey and Abhishek (Chuabey), who run Macguffin Pictures together. Now, around the same time, Vikram (Motwayne) was getting into Sacred Games, and since they had read my script, they thought that both Sacred Games and my film share the cop universe in some way, and called me to come on board. So, I was interviewed by someone at Netflix and got the job to work on Sacred Games. A scene from Sacred Games (Ishika Mohan Motwane/Netflix) Sacred Games was your first release. Tell me what it was working on the first Netflix Original of India. Initially, I thought I was only hired because I was a woman, and they just wanted to satisfy their DEI (Diversity, Equality, Inclusion) policy. And I was very conscious of that. Sudip (Sharma) was there for a little while before he moved on to work on Patal Lok because he could handle only one of those projects. Then there was Vasant Nath in the Writer's Room along with me, and Varun (Grover) was the lead writer on it. Now, funnily enough, at FTII, what they do is, they stop the course for some time and get a person who teaches you to write for TV. Vinod Ranganathan was that person in our course. So, he came, and he was telling us about Netflix and digital and all that. He told us we should break our stories into 100 episodes, and we were like, 'What is he talking about?' We just wanted to get on with our film scripts and make films. So, initially, we wrote him off. But suddenly, I was very into what he was saying. He taught us how to break down a story into 100 episodes, what milestoning is and all of that. It was one of the most intense exercises, probably the most writing I ever did. I picked up Girls Hostel or Ladies Hostel – which eventually became Khauf – to write as a drama, not as horror. Now, when I started working on Sacred Games, and when I read Vikram Chandra's book, my FTII learning appeared to me, and I thought, 'This is how you do it'. So, I was a trained writer, but that was not an asset. Because the others came from a different way of writing. We don't have a tradition of learning to write in this country. We don't have a studio system like in Hollywood where writers are churning out episode after episode week after week. In fact, a lot of Hollywood movies are adaptations of novels or plays. They have a hundred-year-old tradition of screenwriting. But here, it has always been mostly director-led. The director would get some people and tell them to write something, then many times, the director himself would get into writing. Then, for dialogues, they would hire someone else. For me, coming from FTII, it was quite different. I was a little impatient with reinventing the wheel. Writers here have not sat in a Writer's Room, they have never done it in a structured way. I'd say, it wasn't that pleasant for me. In terms of our social and political concerns, Varun and I were on the same page. But it was the nuts and bolts where it was difficult for me. A lot of the writing process was push and pull. For the other two writers, it was also a bit difficult that they were getting notes from an entity (Netflix) other than the director. For me, it wasn't new because getting notes from the BBC or National Geographic was normal in my earlier work. But in terms of excitement, the project was great for me. We broke down episodic beats together, worked on the structure. So, I thought, anything was possible after Sacred Games. Did the credit on Sacred Games help you make what you wanted to?Sacred Games helped me get Midnight's Children. The project never happened, but we wrote it. It was with Vishal (Bharadwaj) ji. There was him, Minty Tejpal, Sabrina Dhawan and I in the Writers' Room. It was a great room. That project did not happen, but during that time, Vishalji read my script of Raat Akeli Hai and introduced me to Aparna (Purohit) at Amazon. So, she came on board, and then Honey (Trehan) and Abhishek (Chuabey) at Macguffin became Executive Line Producers. Honey has a great sense of drama, and he understood my script immediately. The script was already written, though I had been tinkering with it, and the film was then produced by RSVP. 'I picked up Girls Hostel or Ladies Hostel – which eventually became Khauf– to write as a drama, not as horror.' (Courtesy Prime Video) Till recently, a writer would never be able to lead anything in cinema. But now, with the role of the 'Creator' on shows, they can. How was your experience creating Khauf and transitioning from a writer to a writer-creator? I think, before I could do it with Khauf, Sudip (Sharma) was the only one who was a pure writer turned into a creator. Now, with me, there were concerns that there was no Writers' Room. People found it difficult to believe that I could write it all by myself. And I was very clear that I wanted to write alone. I had experienced Writers' Rooms previously, and I definitely did not want to walk that path. For me, way more important than the money or the credit for the show was writing alone. I really wanted to be left alone as a writer. Of course, there is a time when I'd open doors and invite opinions and feedback. In fact, I hired as a creative consultant, one of the most critical minds I knew from FTII, Professor Ashwini Mallick. I trusted him to be very objective about this. He helped me with the initial assessment along with one person at Amazon. We started off in 2020, then Covid hit, my parents were in the ICU and all of that. I asked Amazon if they wanted to get a big director, a big name to lead the project after I was done writing it, but then I realized, why would a big director come and work if I am the creator? So, I thought of leading the show myself. That tells me you believe in the auteur theory. Do you? Well, I do. But it's important to know where that belief is coming from. If I am seeing a woman, sitting by the window, biting into an apple, it's important to know where the image is coming from. If a director tells me this image, and I am writing according to his mind, he is the author, or auteur, of that, and I have just written that. But if every single image forming a narrative is coming from my mind, then I author that story. It's like asking if I believe that the author is the auteur of his novel. He always is, isn't he? Yes, I understand that cinema is more expansive and diverse as a medium. And a lot of the fights between writers and directors originate in this. It's the battle of authorship. How do you define success as a screenwriter? When you work with any material, there is a lot of thinking, a lot of struggle in the process of understanding it and finding your way with it. But there is a moment when you find the answers. Let's say you are struggling with a character arc, and then suddenly you think that this character has to kill someone, and only then will his arc be complete – that is the moment when you win. And nobody can take it away from you. When you have tortured yourself enough, for 16-20 hours a day sometimes, and then when you narrate it to someone, and their jaw drops, that, I think, is success as a screenwriter. Which films and filmmakers have influenced you the most? I didn't even know who Fincher was, and then I once got a DVD and watched Zodiac. Since then, I have watched that film at least twice every year. I can quote every dialogue. It has scenes that are insane, they are art. The film breaks the barrier between the audience and itself. I feel I am part of its scenes. Then Polanski, of course. I don't know why I loved Polanski's and Woody Allen's films so much. I know there is something odd about that. But even before I knew about their lives, I have enjoyed their work. I have seen Woody Allen's work innumerable times. I have seen every Woody Allen film. Same with Polanski's work. I have seen each of his films. I quite like John Carpenter's work as well.

Sinners and Khauf, two atmospheric works of the genre, reveal that true horror is never otherworldly; it lives in the grammar of everyday oppression

Indian Express

09-05-2025

Entertainment
Indian Express

Sinners and Khauf, two atmospheric works of the genre, reveal that true horror is never otherworldly; it lives in the grammar of everyday oppression

The most potent horror is born from the everyday. It dwells in the mundane, resists the mundane, and seeks to reclaim what the mundane has long denied. True horror isn't found in the jump scare but in the silence that paralyses you, in the stillness that keeps you from leaping forward in life. It isn't the invisible terror that hides in shadows, but the one that stands plainly in the light: unavoidable, yet unnavigable. It is not the fresh wound, but the trauma that runs deep, that is ancestral, generational, neck-deep in history. It is always, without exception, sociological, psychological, political. It always, in every instance, wrests power from the marginalised. And soothes the ego of the privileged. It's rare to witness even one horror tale in a year that truly embodies the ethos I just described. Rarer still is the appearance of two. Yet, that's precisely what happened last month, on April 18th. Two vastly different stories: distinct in language, form, format, and narrative style — emerged, stunned, and swept audiences in equal measure. One was Ryan Coogler's global juggernaut Sinners, the other a quiet, simmering Hindi web series titled Khauf, penned by Smita Singh. Both were horror at its most unflinching, cinema at its finest, and society at its most exposed. Watching them in succession is more than just a genre experience; it's a reckoning. A reminder that the most terrifying monsters aren't conjured; they're inherited. They live beneath our skin, waiting, always waiting, for the smallest crack to break through. Both centre on the vulnerable, those reaching for what was never freely given. Both unfold in spaces they hope to reclaim, to remake as havens. And in both, the powerful intrude, unwilling to let them possess even the barest trace of what should have always been theirs. Each story holds within it characters who try to narrow the divide between the real and the uncanny, and others who sneer at the aspirations of the less privileged. They both begin in flight, from pasts soaked in grief, towards futures imagined in light. To new cities, new homes, chasing the promise of liberation. Only to find that what little they once held is stripped away, piece by piece. They end not with resolution, but with a glimpse of the desperate, devouring battle among the dispossessed, as the privileged stand untouched, spewing contempt, writing the story of violence while never having to live it. Shared post on Time What's equally compelling is how, on the surface, both works appear to be conventional genre pieces: familiar in structure, obedient to the rules of the form. For the most part, they play the game as expected. But it is the lived, intimate experience of their creators, Coogler in Sinners, Singh in Khauf — that infuses these narratives with a resonant subtext: one heavy with the ache to survive, to belong, in a world that speaks only in the language of power and listens only to the voices of the privileged. Whether it's the historical struggle of Black and Brown communities in the Deep South, or the daily terror that haunts women in Delhi, both reveal a deeper truth. A realisation that the fears which grip us most are not those caused by the supernatural, but those woven into the fabric of the real. What's even more unsettling and profoundly revealing is how both works suggest that for the marginalised to claim power, they must first inhabit the very skin of their oppressors. It is only through possession, by becoming like them, speaking like them, behaving like them, that they are finally seen. But in that transformation, we do not transcend them. We become them. Shared post on Time Also Read | Khauf review: Psychological horror show digs deep, builds dread There is a deeper, more tragic realisation at play here: when we take up the weapons of the oppressor, we often mistake it for empowerment. We believe we're integrating, rising. But what we're truly doing is allowing their venom to seep into us, their violence to become our reflex, their agenda to dictate our path. We turn on one another. We silence our own. And in that struggle, we begin to lose not just our community, but the clarity of who we were to begin with. So whether it's Stack (Michael B. Jordan) in Sinners or Madhu (Monika Panwar) in Khauf, both are possessed, reshaped into monstrous reflections of those they once feared. And while they do, in time, gain the very power they once longed for, it comes at a steep cost: the loss of love, of tenderness, of self. The horror lies not just in what they become, but in how recognisable that becoming is. It reminds us that our oppressors are, in some way, versions of ourselves we never chose but were forced to emulate. In the end, they do fight back, not to win more power, but to reclaim what was lost in the pursuit of it. Because the wounds we carry are not just reminders of pain. They are, perhaps, the only parts of us that remain uncorrupted. The only parts that still know how to survive. It feels almost poetic that much of this subtextual reckoning is not just written into the narrative, but embedded within the very fabric of craft. In Sinners, it is the sound design that ascends beyond the frame. Ludwig Göransson's score becomes a form of baptism, not in water but in rhythm. In Khauf, Pankaj Kumar's camera moves with an effortless precision, as if mirroring the city itself — restless, yet suffocatingly still when it needs to be. What binds both works is a world-building that feels lived-in, not constructed. In Sinners, it's a town haunted by the ghosts of centuries-old racism — still breathing, still burning — where cultural appropriation wears the mask of reverence. In Khauf, it's a post-Nirbhaya Delhi where nothing has changed except the illusion that something has. A city where every woman's breath teeters between fear and anxiety. In this sense, these are not just stories; they are mirrors held up to a world that, regardless of era, form, or language, has always spoken in the dialect of domination. A world quick to pit the powerless against one another, where women's bodies are never their own, but battlegrounds — claimed, guarded, or destroyed in someone else's name.

"100% Fruit Juice" Claim By Dabur Misleading: Food Regulator To High Court

NDTV

01-05-2025

Business
NDTV

"100% Fruit Juice" Claim By Dabur Misleading: Food Regulator To High Court

New Delhi: The claim made by FMCG giant Dabur that its range of fruit beverages is made "100 per cent" from fruits violates rules and regulations and is also misleading for the consumers, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has informed the Delhi High Court. The writ petition filed by Smita Singh, Assistant Director with the FSSAI dated April 22 (a copy of which is with IANS), challenged Dabur against the "100 per cent" claim stating that the juices contain water and fruit concentrates. In addition, the term "100 per cent" is also not a recognised for food products. "It is respectfully submitted that any Food Business Operator (FBO) who seeks to label, advertise, or market fruit juice products using the expression '100 per cent' does so in the absence of any statutory authorisation and in clear violation of the regulatory framework prescribed under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 and the rules and regulations made thereunder," the petition said. "The expression 100 per cent constitutes a numerical quantification rather than a qualitative descriptor," it added. The food regulator, had, in June 2024 issued a notification directing FBOs to remove claims such as "100 per cent fruit juices" from the label and advertisement of fruit juices. At the time, Dabur argued that the FSSAI's directive was legally unsound and stems from a misunderstanding of the existing regulations, according to reports. In the petition, the FSSAI also cited the views of the scientific panel on Labelling and Claims/Advertisements (SP-08) during its 47th and 49th meetings, on its three products under Real's range of fruit beverages -- Mixed Fruit Juice, Apple Juice, and Grape Juice. "The 100 per cent claim is misleading since the ingredient list clearly indicates addition of water and the mixed fruit juice concentrate is 6.8 per cent along with the addition of natural flavouring substances," as per the meeting inputs. "The term 100 per cent is not defined in the FSS Act 2006, Rules and regulations," it added. The matter is reportedly pending before the Delhi HC, and the next date of hearing is July 7.

'100% fruit juice' claim by Dabur violates law, misleading: FSSAI to Delhi HC

Time of India

01-05-2025

Business
Time of India

'100% fruit juice' claim by Dabur violates law, misleading: FSSAI to Delhi HC

Beating Retreat post Pahalgam a lot quieter. Soldiers still march in sync, but not face-to-face

The Print

29-04-2025

Politics
The Print

Beating Retreat post Pahalgam a lot quieter. Soldiers still march in sync, but not face-to-face

Following the terror attack in Pahalgam on 22 April in which at least 26 were killed, India announced a series of retaliatory measures against Pakistan last week. Among them was the closure of the Wagah gate during the daily flag-lowering ceremony, suspension of the traditional handshake between personnel of India's Border Security Force (BSF) and Pakistan Rangers, and the cancellation of all Pakistani visas. 'The ceremony was amazing, no doubt,' said Bharat, clutching a newly bought fridge magnet depicting the Indian Tricolour. 'But with the gates closed and our soldiers not marching directly in front of Pakistan's… that feeling is missing.' Amritsar: Two months after planning a dream visit to witness the grand Beating Retreat ceremony at the Attari-Wagah border, Smita Singh and Bharat Singh flew to Amritsar all the way from Bengaluru. But when they reached Attari this weekend, it felt incomplete. The gates that used to open symbolically every evening—sometimes even for the exchange of sweets on festivals—are now firmly shut. The parade continues, but Indian soldiers now march and perform drills without facing their counterparts from across the border. The Pakistani side also remains quieter, with fewer chants from the crowd. 'There was a time when you could hear slogans bouncing back and forth from both sides,' said a senior BSF officer posted at the border, requesting anonymity. 'Now, we raise our voices alone. It's more about inner pride than competition now.' The fierce—but subtly friendly—standoff between the soldiers of the two nations used to attract several spectators every evening. The tourists are still turning up in large numbers, but leaving with mixed emotions. 'We expected some action across the gate, too. It's a little strange to see it locked, but we also feel proud that India is standing strong,' said Ritu Yogi, who was visiting from Jaipur, as she waved a miniature Indian flag. 'The spirit is always high, but the emotion is heavier,' said a young soldier after finishing the evening drill. 'Earlier, there was a sense of informal sportsmanship, too. Now it's strictly about discipline, about reminding the world where we stand.' For local shopkeepers near Attari, the closure has had subtle ripple effects. But 'patriotism' runs deeper than profit here. Rajveer Gill, who runs a souvenir stall near the border, said, 'It is a very small cost for what happened in Pahalgam. If our government has taken a decision, we will follow it. We don't have any problem with it.' The government's other major steps, including holding Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance and halting cross-border transport, have sent a clear diplomatic signal, but on the ground, it is the daily rhythms of border life that have changed most visibly. Even as chants of 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' fill the air, there is a notable absence of competition from across the border. The crowds still cheer, the soldiers still march in perfect sync, and flags still lower at sunset with the same grandeur. But the Attari-Wagah border, which used to be enveloped by fiery pride and fleeting friendliness, now bears a heavier silence. (Edited by Mannat Chugh) Also Read: At Attari-Wagah, spate of forced goodbyes as Indians, Pakistanis scramble to return to home country