There is a boy who cannot see the blackboard. He squints, copies, and stumbles his way through. He doesn’t tell his mother. He doesn’t tell his teacher. At first, this seems like a story about a shy child with myopia. But in Nitin Baid’s quietly devastating short film Chashma, it becomes much more. The boy becomes a metaphor. A witness. A reminder that in a nation still finding its footing, we’re often taught to look away— first as children, then as citizens.
Chashma, written by Varun Grover and directed by Baid in his debut outing, is only fifteen minutes long. But in that timespan, it creates a world that is heartbreakingly complete. Set in Pune in 1992, just before the Babri Masjid demolition, the film captures a country on the verge of moral rupture, all through the limited yet instinctively aware perspective of a child. What begins as a personal narrative slowly stretches into a sociopolitical statement.
The premise is simple. An 11-year-old schoolboy named Supriyo is struggling to see clearly. His vision is faltering, but he hides it from those around him. When he becomes a witness to a schoolyard incident, he must navigate his blurred perception of what he saw and did not see. What emerges is a reflection on the biases we internalize, the truths we suppress, and the uncomfortable tension between sight and insight.
Director Nitin Baid, best known as the editor of films like Masaan, Gully Boy, Homebound and The Archies, brings a precise, minimalist hand to his directorial debut. But unlike the ensemble dramas he helped shape in the editing room, Chashma is stripped down to its essentials. It is a film that hums with restraint, allowing mood, memory and implication to carry the emotional weight.
“I wanted to explore what it means to look at the world when you’re not fully ready,” Baid tells Rolling Stone India. “That feeling of not wanting to wear glasses as a child was not just about being teased. It was about hiding. About not confronting things you don’t want to see. That stayed with me.”
This idea of emotional myopia becomes central. The boy’s blurred vision is not the issue. It is the world around him that avoids clarity. Baid explained, “We don’t inherit just our family names. We inherit silences. We inherit the way people avoid talking about things. This film is about that invisible inheritance.”
The setting is no accident. 1992 was a year of fractures in India. The Babri Masjid demolition, Hindu-Muslim tensions, and a surge in nationalistic rhetoric marked a shift in the country’s consciousness. Yet Chashma never shows these events head-on. Instead, they leak in through radio bulletins, snippets of conversation, and the quiet unease of adults who know more than they say. The child, still untainted by ideology, senses the atmosphere shifting. His myopia becomes a lens, not just for childhood uncertainty, but also for a country deliberately blurring its moral vision.
Varun Grover’s script avoids exposition. It trusts the viewer. In past interviews, Grover has spoken about how the film’s core idea struck him for its intimacy and what is left unsaid. He was drawn to the way Baid’s story resisted simplification and allowed its political undercurrent to emerge through personal memory. The script, much like the film itself, values vulnerability over resolution.
Konkona Sen Sharma, who plays Supriyo’s mother, is magnetic in her stillness. In a stroke of casting genius, Baid gives her a role that steers clear of melodrama. She plays Aarti, a single mother navigating life without letting it be defined solely by motherhood. “It was a very layered character,” Konkona told Rolling Stone India. “She is not just a mother. She is someone who has gone through separation, has a romantic interest, is working, and is trying to be emotionally available to her son. That kind of complexity in such a small part is very rare.” In just a few short scenes, she infuses the role with dignity, fatigue and resilience. “I could see her in the women I grew up around in Calcutta. The kind who never complain, who manage everything, and who still get judged,” she said. Her character doesn’t perform her strength, she inhabits it. That unspoken endurance anchors Chashma.
The other characters are equally well-drawn. Schoolteachers operate on autopilot. Older students bully or ignore. Every figure in Supriyo’s orbit is sketched just enough to feel real, but never so much that they distract from the film’s central conceit: how the world appears before we are taught what to see.
Shot in a tight 1.66:1 aspect ratio by Linesh Desai, the visuals feel intimate but never claustrophobic. There is a softness to the light, a sense of floating through a world that is slightly out of focus. The production design is subtle, recreating the early nineties with care instead of nostalgia. Allwin Rego and Sanjay Maurya’s sound design further enriches this texture. Radios mumble in the background, conversations occur behind closed doors, and silence stretches across scenes with a deliberate heaviness
At the heart of it all is Supriyo. Played by Ayan Khan, the boy is neither precocious nor performative. His face is a map of quiet calculations. He watches, absorbs, and internalises. When he is finally given a pair of glasses, the film offers no catharsis. There is no swell of music, no triumphant smile. Just clarity. And with it, the slow, painful recognition of the world around him.
Chashma’s superpower is its subtlety. It doesn’t offer easy answers or preachy solutions. Instead, it carefully observes—in classrooms, balconies and quiet car rides. It reminds us that much of growing up is about learning to read between the lines of the unsaid. That perception is not only shaped by the eye, but by everything we inherit through tone, posture, and avoidance.
“We wanted to explore how a child begins to form bias,” Baid explained. “Not through explicit teaching, but through subtle signals. Through what is not said. Through what is implied. Through what is never questioned.” In that sense, Chashma is a film about education in the widest sense. What we teach without words. What we learn through watching. And what we forget to unlearn.
It is no surprise that the film has resonated across the festival circuit. After premiering at MAMI 2024, it screened at the Indie Meme Festival in Austin, Dharamshala, and the New York Indian Film Festival. At the Rhode Island International Film Festival, it won a semi-finalist award. Critics and audiences have praised its delicate precision, calling it a coming-of-age story with political undertones and quiet force.
But perhaps Chashma’s greatest strength is that it never feels like it is trying to be important. It’s simply being honest. And in its honesty, it reveals something rarely captured in Indian cinema: a child’s first encounter with moral ambiguity. Not through violence or drama, but through everyday moments of confusion, hesitation, and learning to look again.
There is a scene near the end of the film, described in press materials, where Supriyo must decide what he did or did not see. The decision he makes is less important than the fact that he is forced to make it. He must stake his truth. And as he does, the viewer is reminded that clarity comes with responsibility.
Chashma is not about whether we see clearly. It is about whether we dare to. About how vision, in a country as complex and burdened as India, is never just physical. It is political. It is emotional. It is inherited. In the final moment, the boy looks out at the world through new lenses. Everything is sharper. But with that sharpness comes the weight of understanding. And in that small, wordless moment, Chashma says everything it needs to. That what we choose to see fully, clearly, without fear, is what might just set us free.