Nadav Lapid controversy at IFFI Goa; Ravish Kumar resignation from NDTV

Two seemingly unrelated stories I reported on for Deadline this week reflect the worrying direction of travel in post-pandemic India.

On Monday evening, Berlin Golden Bear-winning filmmaker Nadav Lapid, head of the competition jury at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa, stood alone on stage at the closing ceremony and became the little boy who shouted that the emperor was not wearing any clothes.

While praising the other 14 films in competition, he described Vivek Agnihotri’s Hindi-language The Kashmir Files as “a propaganda, vulgar movie, inappropriate for an artistic competitive section of such a prestigious film festival”. It was a shocking moment because how often have we sat through these butt-numbing ceremonies stuffed full of speeches from government officials where nothing remotely interesting is likely to happen.

The reaction on social media was swift and vitriolic – much was made of the fact that Lapid is Israeli, so should sympathise with the subject of the…