Content is a parasite. It feeds on "relevance" until the word loses all meaning, turning every social ache and political fracture into a thumbnail you can scroll past on your way to a recipe for air-fryer pasta.

Anubhav Sinha knows this game. He’s the director who traded the glossy, big-budget bloat of Ra.One for the sharp, surgical discomfort of Article 15 and Mulk. He found a niche in making the kind of movies that people call "important" while they’re checking their phones during the slow parts. Now, he’s back with ASSI, and he’s brought Kumud Mishra along for the ride.

Mishra is the actor you hire when you want a film to feel like it has a soul. He doesn't have the plastic sheen of a Mumbai superstar; he has the weary, lived-in face of a man who’s seen the bill and knows we can’t afford it. But when I sat down with him to talk about this latest "relevant" project, he wasn't interested in the usual PR script.

"I find it odd to say that it's a relevant film," Mishra told me, leaning back with the kind of skepticism usually reserved for people selling crypto. "Because if these issues are still relevant, it means we’ve failed. It means the film is a document of a disaster that’s still happening."

It’s a blunt assessment. It cuts through the marketing fluff that usually surrounds these prestige dramas. Usually, the "relevance" of a film is sold as a feature, like a higher resolution or a better frame rate. It’s a way to tell the audience that their ticket price—or their monthly subscription fee—is actually a micro-donation to social progress.

Mishra isn't buying it. Neither should you.

The friction here isn't just in the script. It’s in the industry itself. ASSI is trying to exist in a theatrical market that has become increasingly hostile to anything that doesn't involve a cape or a massive explosion. The trade-off for making a "relevant" film in 2024 is that you’re playing a rigged game. You’re competing for screens against movies with marketing budgets that could fund a small nation's space program. You’re fighting for oxygen in an algorithm that rewards loud noises over quiet truths.

Sinha and Mishra have a history of this. They’ve built a shorthand that relies on what isn't said. In ASSI, that silence is supposed to do the heavy lifting. But silence doesn't always translate to the box office. The "relevance" tag is a desperate plea for eyeballs in an era where the "Skip Intro" button is the most-used feature on our remotes.

Mishra’s discomfort with the word "relevant" points to a deeper rot in how we consume stories. We want our cinema to be a mirror, but only if the lighting is flattering. We want to feel "informed" without actually having to do the work of changing anything. If a film about social stagnation is "relevant" fifty years after the same problems were first put on celluloid, then the film isn't a breakthrough. It’s a ledger of our collective inertia.

The production of ASSI reportedly faced its own set of hurdles—tight windows, location permits that vanished when the local authorities read the subtext, and the constant, nagging pressure to make the "message" more palatable for a global streaming audience. The cost of being "real" is high. It’s much cheaper to build a world in a computer than it is to point a camera at the one we actually live in.

Mishra knows the drill. He’s been the backbone of these projects for years, providing the grit that stops the "important cinema" from floating away into pure pretension. He’s the guy who makes the dialogue sound like something a human would actually say, rather than a manifesto delivered to a balcony.

But he seems tired of the labels. "We call it relevant to make ourselves feel better about the fact that nothing has changed," he says. It’s a cold take in a room full of warm PR sentiment.

The industry will keep churning out these "relevant" stories because they look good on a slide deck for investors who want to pretend they have a conscience. They provide a nice, respectable veneer for a business that is mostly about selling popcorn and data.

We’ll watch ASSI. We’ll talk about how "timely" it is on social media. We’ll praise Mishra for his grounded performance and Sinha for his "brave" choices. Then we’ll close the app and wait for the next notification to tell us what to care about next.

If the movie is truly relevant, shouldn't we be more upset that it had to be made at all?