Vasan Bala loves the Mumbai that Bollywood never bothers to showcase. In his debut feature, the unreleased Peddlers, he unflinchingly chronicles three lives caught in the bowels of the metropolis. After six years, his sophomore effort, Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota (MKDNH), can be nearly interpreted as an ode to Matunga, the Mumbai neighbourhood that seems to house most of the city’s Tamils.
The film, as the title suggests, is the story of a young man whose congenital defect allows him to take any amount of pain without the slightest grimace. Abhimanyu Dassani is a lugubrious charmer as Surya, the