The Storyteller's Lens

A title reveal that showed us everything — except the filmmaker we once knew.

The title-reveal event of SS Rajamouli’s Varanasi was nothing short of a spectacle—lights, choreography, music, crowds, scale. A full-blown show for a title reveal.
Not a trailer.
Not a thematic teaser.
Just a carefully controlled glimpse of Mahesh Babu and a soundtrack engineered to stir excitement.

And yet, amid all that grandeur, one simple question kept circling in my mind:

Why?
What purpose did this serve?

They spoke of “celebrating cinema” and “pushing boundaries,” but shared nothing meaningful about the film itself.
A whisper about Prithviraj possibly playing the antagonist.
A faint suggestion of time travel.
The name Varanasi echoing across the stage.

And so much noise.

And somewhere in that noise, I found myself thinking of a different Rajamouli.

The Rajamouli who let a housefly carry a story.
Who stitched reincarnation and revenge into magic.
Who wrote women who were fierce, central, unforgettable.
Who didn’t need a stage show to move an audience—he needed only a story.

That Rajamouli’s spectacle had soul.
The scale came after the story, not instead of it.

With Baahubali: The Conclusion, I already sensed a shift—a filmmaker responding to the mythos of his own success. What felt organic in part one became magnified in part two, and the emotional thread frayed at the seams. The ending felt rushed, uneven, almost burdened by expectation.

RRR had a strong central idea—fire and water—but even there, the balancing act for its two stars was unmistakable. Equal glory, equal pain, equal heroics. And somewhere in that perfect symmetry, the women faded into near-invisibility.

Which brings me back to Varanasi.

Why this extravagant title reveal?
Why orchestrate a massive event when not a single piece of the film’s soul was allowed to surface?
Was this truly a celebration of cinema…
or a meticulously crafted exercise in hype?
A push to ride Mahesh Babu’s star power rather than reveal the filmmaker’s vision?

The crowd roared. Passes were scanned. Excitement peaked.
But once the lights dimmed and the applause dissolved, I was left with an unsettling sense that the storyteller was missing.

That beneath the fireworks and fog machines, the Rajamouli who once trusted narrative more than noise had been overshadowed by the Rajamouli forced to outdo the legend of his own name.

Maybe that’s what happens when a filmmaker becomes a phenomenon.
Or maybe…I’m simply searching for the man who once made me believe that a fly could carry a film.