Screenwriter Apurva Asrani has hit back at Yash’s request that audiences stop nitpicking the visual effects in Ramayana, saying the appeal sounds like a slide toward dictatorship.
What Yash actually said
At a pre-release event in Hyderabad, Yash asked fans to back the film instead of dissecting its VFX. His argument was that India should protect producer Namit Malhotra, described by Yash as one of the few with the passion, dedication and madness to take Indian cinema global.
Yash recalled that Malhotra was comfortably doing business in Los Angeles but kept returning to one wish: Indians have done so much, yet the Indian film industry should be placed at the highest global level. “We need to protect this guy,” Yash said, framing support as a national responsibility.
The stakes are real. At the trailer launch in Bengaluru, Yash confirmed that the two-part epic has a combined budget of ₹4,000 crore. Ramayana stars Yash as Ravana and Ranbir Kapoor as Lord Rama.
Asrani’s reply turns political
Asrani, whose writing credits include Shahid and Aligarh, responded on X. He wrote that he would not be surprised if people were thrown into “friggin’ Tihar Jail” for disliking the new Ramayana, refusing to bang a thali, or daring to eat a chicken burger on a Tuesday.
He linked the comment to the arrest of Cockroach Janta Party leaders Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, held in Delhi’s Tihar Jail for allegedly trespassing at the Jantar Mantar protest site after it was removed from the list of authorised demonstration venues. Asrani argued that the Constitution has been “reduced to a mockery” and urged people to raise their voices before even a joke, a question or the slightest disagreement invites state retaliation.
Why this matters for fans
The row folds a craft debate into a bigger free-speech argument. Three things are now in play:
- Scale: ₹4,000 crore across two parts makes this one of Indian cinema’s most expensive bets.
- Patriotism: Yash framed support for the producer as an Indian duty.
- Dissent: Asrani framed VFX criticism as a citizen’s right that should not be met with threats, rhetorical or real.
Indian epics are judged on more than spectacle: audiences arrive with deep visual memory of the story, so VFX choices become emotional as well as technical. That is exactly why a request to skip nitpicking landed as censorship to Asrani. Yash’s position is not unusual for a big-budget spectacle: producers often ask audiences to judge the whole film rather than freeze on early VFX frames. But Asrani’s response shows that, in the current climate, even a marketing request can be read through a political lens. The result is that Ramayana‘s VFX conversation is no longer just about CGI quality. For some fans it is a test of free expression; for others it is an appeal to back an ambitious Indian production.
Source: Hindustan Times