Buddha in a Traffic Jam

Buddha in a Traffic Jam is a 2016 Indian political thriller film written and directed by Vivek Agnihotri. The film stars Anupam Kher, Arunoday Singh, Mahie Gill, and Pallavi Joshi, and explores themes of corruption, campus politics, and the influence of Maoism on academia.

Vikram

• Just an earthen pot! But a rare piece of India's artistic tribal heritage.... I thought about the responsibility that...that education should bring. I thought about why despite of booming economy....and an industrial growth rate rivaling any other in the world....why are we still a poor country? Why are our villagers, our downtrodden, our rural areas, our tribals....all not getting even a single piece of this growth? And then I realized that this pot, has the potential to change all that.

Sheetal

• If my husband can be a Maoist, so can your father!... They are spread across all over India so you have to run away Vikram.

Quotes about Buddha in a Traffic Jam

• Going by a dialogue in the film, "Guns have to be our minds and ammunition — our thoughts," the experience of watching this film will stoke you to load one into the other and aim at self.
  • Review by Kunal Guha of Mumbai Mirror on 14 May 2016

• Vivek Agnihotri's Buddha in a Traffic Jam severely lacks artistic merit, but it will forever be entrenched in memory as one of the zeitgeist films of the Modi era. [...] Fortunately, Agnihotri isn't as skilled a propagandist as Leni Riefenstahl and more a modern-day Don Quixote. As he sallies forth against the windmills of his imagination, his political and economic prescriptions for a better India get the better of his storytelling.
  • Review by Nandini Ramnath of Scroll.in on 13 May 2016

• The one true requirement of a propaganda film is that it be effective. Emphatic instruments of (mis)information and awareness, instruments geared to trigger a change in mindset, to squelch a way of thinking and to encourage another. It is frequently unsubtle filmmaking that belabours its point, but its work can also be subversive and sly and admittedly clever. Buddha In A Traffic Jam is none of those things. Which is why my heart bleeds for Indian Right-Wingers misled into believing this is the film they need to put their weight behind.
  • Review by Raja Sena of Rediff on 13 May 2016

• Writer-director Vivek Agnihotri – the maker of such drivel as Zid, Chocolate, and Hate Story – thinks Buddha in a Traffic Jam is his piece de resistance. By the end of it, this too, appears just as amateur and laughable. [...] What Buddha is instead, is propaganda disguised as cinema.
  • Review by Sarit Ray of the Hindustan Times on 14 May 2016

See also

• The Tashkent Files

External links

• Buddha in a Traffic Jam quotes at the Internet Movie Database