Flipping channels post dinner on a Sunday night, I came across Konkona Sen Sharma’s face mouthing some dialogue on Jalsha Movies, Star TV’s Bangla movie channel. Now, Konkona is supposed to be a bright woman, not exactly your run-of-the-mill actor. So we stopped, the wife and I.

The film, we were told by a small update on the top left of the screen, was ‘Doshor’. The wife checked on the phone and found it a national award winner, directed by Rituparno Ghosh — the average Bengali’s new-age version of Satyajit Ray.

Superb, we thought, like Bengalis are programmed to think when they mean anything from ‘okay, not bad’ and all the way up to ‘this is freaking brilliant; the best ever thing discovered by man since the first Hilsa was caught in the Padma’.

The film was about marital infidelity, where everyone seemed to be either going around or itching to go around with another’s spouse. This was three hours or so since we discovered another such movie, again while flipping channels for want of anything better to do on a Sunday evening. Race-2, on Zee Movies, where everyone seemed gregarious, super-slick and uber-decked up, going around with another’s partner, and perhaps itching to go around with a second partner (of another man/woman) at the same time.

The two films, of course, cannot be the same, we thought. Rituparno Ghosh, after all, is supposed to be a cerebral filmmaker, as feature articles in magazines put it, though I have personally always treated the adjective with suspicion — the word sounds more scary (cerebral attack inducing?) and naive (something to do with Cerelac?) than what it actually means: clever. But let me not digress: Doshor, as I said earlier, was superb. It was black and white, the people spoke a language I could figure out without having to check the subtitles every other nanosecond, and everyone looked more sober and ‘real’ than even the black background with the titles rolling down in Race-2.

That was for 25 minutes, give or take five.

I am no authority on films or filmmaking but what got my goat was the film’s pace — rather, the absolute lack of it — and the overall feeling of ennui. And, pray, why was a film made in 2005 or 2006 in black and white? If you think you can be Ray or Ritwik Ghatak by making films in black and white, I believe you should spend your time doing something else — like lying back on an armchair in your home or lazing around in a bathrobe, again in your home. Either way, just steer clear of making a film and then putting it for screening at a public auditorium and expect people to watch it.

And that is precisely the point where I disagree, and quite vehemently at that, with observers whose observations sting any predictable top-100 list of films to coincide with Indian cinema’s 100th year. Where, pray, are the “good” films, the non-Bollywood, the non-commercial, the regional films, they ask, nay snigger.

It’s there on your desktop, your local CD/DVD library or on the internet, I tell them.

I am not saying Race-2 is better than Doshor, or that the folks on the jury who decided to give Rituparno’s film a national award were smoking something. I am saying you can watch the former, and then laugh at/about the outrageousness and ludicrousness of it all. You can do the same with films like Doshor, but in all probability you wouldn’t have gathered enough wits about it. For you never could finish watching it.