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.
