With its rotary phones, clanking printing presses, news rooms full of typewriters, ticker tapes and other details of vintage setting, New Delhi Times should feel like a time capsule. But this 1986 film’s recent appearance on YouTube shows it remains tragically relevant for all the wrong reasons. 

Set in a New Delhi where the smog doesn’t get in the way of zooming in on the capital’s gorgeous, historic architecture, the film is an examination of how difficult it was for journalism to uphold its part in the business of democracy in Eighties’ India. Almost 40 years later, only the superficial details feel dated. Thanks to director Ramesh Sharma’s razor-sharp storytelling, the story of New Delhi Times feels intelligent, insightful and as true to our present as it was to the 1980s.

Sharma brought together the best of Hindi cinema to make his debut film – a cast that included Shashi Kapoor, Sharmila Tagore, Om Puri and A K Hangal alongside unknown faces that look perfect in their parts; a script by Gulzar, cinematography by Subrata Mitra, editing by Renu Saluja, sound design by Dev Benegal, art direction by Nitish Roy and Samir Chandra. Every department delivered to create firecracker fiction that makes you wonder what our cinemas could have been if more directors like Sharma had got the backing of the industry.

The hero of New Delhi Times is Vikas Pande (Shashi Kapoor), a small-town lad who has grown up to be the executive editor of the English language newspaper after which the film is named. In his introduction scene, we see Vikas change the front page of the next day’s edition to make space for an article about a hooch tragedy in which most of the victims are migrant labourers. Our protagonist is immediately established as a journalist who values social justice and believes the media’s job is to speak for those who are voiceless and marginalised. 

After a reporter with New Delhi Times is killed just as he was on his way to meet Vikas, unsavoury forces threaten the picture-perfect world that Vikas has built for himself in Delhi with his lawyer wife Nisha (Sharmila Tagore). He realises there are connections between four seemingly-unrelated incidents: New Delhi Times’s dead journalist, a murdered legislator, riots in Vikas’s home town of Ghazipur, and the power struggle between chief minister Trivedi (Ram Gopal Bajaj) and his upstart rival, Ajay Singh (Om Puri). As he starts investigating these matters, clues point to Ajay Singh having killed the legislator and being behind the riots as well as the hooch tragedy. Fuelled by idealism and a dislike of Singh’s naked ambition, Vikas digs deeper, only to plunge all the moving parts of his life into crisis mode.

News-worthy cinema

There is not a dull moment in Gulzar’s taut screenplay, which only resorts to convenient coincidences in a few scenes towards the end. For most part, New Delhi Times is a gripping thriller, teeming with mic-drop dialogues, particularly when Vikas discusses journalism with his photojournalist friend, Anwar. “Tum aur main logon ko sirf entertain karte hain. Woh jo striptease dancer thi na, woh apne ko nanga kar ke doosro ka dil behlati hai. Lekin hum log doosro ko nanga karke apna aur duniya ka dil behlate hain (You and I just entertain people. That striptease dancer? She takes off her clothes to entertain others. We strip others naked to entertain ourselves and the world),” Anwar tells Vikas. An ex-bureaucrat says while puffing on his Cuban cigar, “Sach toh woh hai jo koi na koi, kahin na kahin, chhupaye rakhna chahta hai. Aur woh hi asli khabar bhi hai. Baaki toh sab advertisement hai (The real truth is what is kept hidden. And that’s the real news story too. Everything else is an advertisement).” This observation-cum-warning turns out to be at the crux of New Delhi Times and by the time Vikas realises how relevant it is to the case he’s working on, it’s too late.

Even for throwaway moments like when Vikas makes a dismissive comment about a dowry case Nisha has taken on, Gulzar gives Nisha a response that feels like a punch in the gut: “Sab ladkiyaan jalkar khatam nahin ho jaya karti. Aur bahut kuchh hota hai unke saath (Not all girls are burnt to death. There’s a lot more that can be done to them).” The film begins with a monologue in which the camera roams around a sun-kissed Delhi and Vikas muses about whose history we inherit through monuments and official records. New Delhi Times ends with the camera moving in the opposite direction, indicating a journey of introspection as we travel inward, deep into Vikas’s home, to see him in a small bubble of light, surrounded by darkness. “Yaqeen nahin aata yeh wohi desh hai jahaan 50 saal pehle, leader aur awaam ek saath azaadi ki ladai lad rahe the (It’s difficult to believe that this is the same country where, 50 years ago, leaders and the public fought for freedom together),” he says.

New Delhi Times may have been inspired by Arun Shourie’s exposé of A R Antulay, who was the chief minister of Maharashtra and forced to resign after The Indian Express broke the story of Antulay’s corruption. Like Vikas, Shourie was the executive editor at the time; but while his takedown of Antulay is one of Indian journalism’s more glorious chapters, Vikas is more of a cautionary tale. His impassioned demands for press freedom are laced with irony once it becomes clear that Vikas was used to fulfill the agenda of someone whom Vikas didn’t want to champion. More than once, Sharma shows Vikas holding a lit match for a smidge too long. That he has been playing with fire both literally and metaphorically only becomes clear when the final twist of the tale is revealed. Vikas’s idealism should have been an armour against conspiracy, but it proves to be more of a blindfold. Ultimately, the triumph of journalism in New Delhi Times is a hollow one and the film points out that journalism is up against a nexus between politics, business and crime.   

Or at least the original film did. 

Senseless cuts

In one of the final scenes of New Delhi Times, two journalists and a lawyer watch a politician talk to the nation via Doordarshan news. Suddenly, for a fraction of a second, everything fades to black before returning to the politician. Immediately, the screen fades a second time, again while the politician speaks. Since this really is a “rare political thriller” (that’s from the YouTube description), you might think the black outs are a silencing device. Technically, they are. Two fragments of dialogue are muted when the screen goes dark, but not because of what is said in them. 

It seems someone in Shemaroo decided fade-to-black was the best way to ‘fix’ New Delhi Times. In the original film, those moments show the television screen flicker, which was a standard problem back in the days of unsmart TVs and analogue channels. Whoever snipped the flickers out of New Delhi Times had to choose between the dialogues making sense and the image living up to claims of this version being HD. Fittingly for our performative age, they chose visuals over meaning. The politician’s dialogues no longer make sense, but the image looks clean. 

Those two blips are not the only modifications made to New Delhi Times, which was originally released in 1986 and remains the best film Hindi cinema has made on journalism. In the process of remastering it, the entire film has been cropped and force fitted into a different aspect ratio from what was used at the time of shooting. Consequently, it looks like cinematographer Subrata Mitra didn’t know where to focus and regularly sliced off one-third of Shashi Kapoor’s face with the framing. As interventions go, this is criminal because Mitra had an impeccable sense of geometry and light. While no one should complain about getting close-up shots of Kapoor’s eyes – those eyelashes deserve their own fan club – the cropped frame is a desecration if you know how thoughtfully Mitra set up his shots. 

That’s not all. The official version of New Delhi Times, recently uploaded on to the Kapoors of Bollywood You Tube channel, is missing nine scenes, including one in which two parents read a letter from their son, in which the boy says he likes cricket and the sweater that was sent to him. If anyone needed proof that we are eyeballs deep in an era of senseless self-censorship, this is it.

In the version that’s been uploaded on YouTube, the first cut comes about 17 minutes into the film, when the editor of New Delhi Times tells Vikas that their proprietor Jagannath Poddar (Manohar Singh) is curious about Ajay Singh. Ostensibly, this indicates New Delhi Times is a unicorn because whoever heard of editorial (Vikas) and management (Poddar) in a media company being on the same page? However, once the film’s evil mastermind is revealed, this is one of the many scenes that raises questions about the role played by Vikas’s editor and where Poddar’s loyalties lie in the power tussle between Trivedi and Singh. Hindsight is a powerful storytelling tool in New Delhi Times and in the unedited version of the film, it works with smooth subtlety to create doubts and raise questions about characters who initially seemed unadulterated. 

Three minutes later, there’s another abrupt cut when Trivedi is seen on television, boasting that his government has brought drinking water and electricity to 90 percent of Uttar Pradesh. Why this snippet needed to be cut is among the unanswered mysteries of the universe. Perhaps this was a misguided editorial call by whoever is responsible for the remastering because they thought New Delhi Times needed trimming. (The pace of the original film doesn’t lag for a second, by the way.)  Or maybe someone got the heebie jeebies at the thought of people connecting Trivedi to contemporary politicians who have made similar announcements. 

Trivedi’s second appearance also sees a cut and this one is more important to the story. Towards the end of New Delhi Times, Trivedi’s secretary comes up to him and says a journalist has met with the guard of a circuit house who is a key witness to the murder of the legislator. “What circuit house? What guard?” snaps Trivedi. “Why am I being bothered with such minor details?” In the next scene, we learn the guard has been found dead and the authorities suspect suicide. It is Trivedi’s dialogue that establishes the guard’s death as suspicious. Without that clue, Vikas’s doubts could just as easily be paranoia because in the one scene the guard gets, he is overwrought (with good reason). 

Playing it safe

In Self-Censorship in Contexts of Conflict, academic Daniel Bar-Tal defines self-censorship as “the act of intentionally and voluntarily withholding information from others in the absence of formal obstacles.” This obstruction to freedom of expression is imposed in order to make a statement establishing one’s conformity and obedience. While listing the reasons for self-censorship, he says people or collectives “decide to self-censor … content, believing that revealing it may be costly to them or to other people or to society.” Are the cuts that effectively remove Trivedi from New Delhi Times inspired by an incoherent fear that the evil politician could be interpreted as a creature of the present despite the film being set in the 1980s? Would that be better or worse than the cuts being made randomly or out of the conviction that the snipped film is a better product?   

Another cut is in the middle of the film, when Vikas finds out through a phone call that the accused who claimed Ajay Singh had murdered the legislator has recanted his testimony. The original version has Vikas receive the call and then discuss what he was told with Nisha. It is through their conversation that the audience finds out about the latest development in the case. In the edited version uploaded on YouTube, the short conversation between Vikas and Nisha has been cut out. All we get to see is Vikas responding vaguely to an unknown caller. We don’t find out about the volte face by the accused and nor do we see how Vikas’s biased view of Ajay Singh is affecting his judgement.

Some of the cuts made to New Delhi Times could be explained as overzealous attempts to avoid controversy, like the decision to remove a shot that showed Vikas and Nisha’s pet cat lying in a pool of blood (on grounds of it being gory); or to not show Anwar raise a mug of beer to toast to Vikas’s success (since alcohol consumption is forbidden in Islam). However, most of the cuts can only be described as mystifying. For instance, at one point in New Delhi Times, Vikas and Nisha are attacked by thugs. Vikas’s hand is crushed in the ensuing fight while Nisha is manhandled. The scene ends with a shot of the battered couple in the foreground, sitting in a crumpled mess on the dusty earth and leaning against their Ambassador car, while in the background, with its industries and belching smoke, stands the city as a silent, uncaring witness. It’s a striking and poignant composition. By cutting it out, all New Delhi Times manages to do is lose a little beauty. 

The changes made to New Delhi Times make it weaker at a narrative level, removing details of characterisation and motivation. The wrong aspect ratio makes every shot look worse. What makes all this particularly frustrating is that it was done voluntarily by those who legally own the film. If New Delhi Times had been a polemic about an ideology or politics or a political figure; if the cuts introduced to the film were designed to show a particular character in a bad light; or if there were complaints or negative online chatter, we could try to rationalise the cuts made to the film. Unfortunately, the need to ‘play it safe’ and pre-empt criticism or offense can’t be rationalised. It’s fear at work, and fear is irrational by nature. The cuts reduce New Delhi Times to a damaged version of itself. As a result, the official version of this film is less authentic than the pirated versions, despite the terrible technical quality of the latter.

Of late, there has been a lot of conversation on the dangers posed by artificial intelligence (AI) after the producers used AI to change the ending of Raanjhanaa, without consulting or involving the film’s director Aanand L Rai. The edited version of New Delhi Times is a reminder that the Hindi film industry doesn’t need AI to abuse its rights. It can defang itself with whatever technology is at its disposal.  

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