Over the past year, he has made more news for his blistering takedowns of Bollywood’s toxicity—and for his startling claim that he might quit the industry altogether—than for his films. While his recent work, “Nishaanchi,” has been uneven, Kashyap remains one of the rare Indian filmmakers whose cinema continues to spark fierce debate. “Kennedy,” feted on the international festival circuit, is still caught in India’s censorship quagmire, while several other projects have been unceremoniously shelved.
Kashyap has been candid about these roadblocks, even going so far as to call out Netflix’s CEO for vanishing mid-way through the development of “Maximum City.” It is within this turbulent context that “No Smoking” (2007) deserves another look—a film that, more than any other in his career, encapsulates Kashyap’s perennial clashes with censorship, authority, and the limits of artistic freedom. Misread and rejected on release, it now stands as his most subversive, prophetic, and politically charged work.
The Misunderstood Film
When “No Smoking” premiered, it was met with scathing reviews and box office rejection. Critics called it confusing, “too Western,” or simply incoherent. Audiences expecting a conventional morality tale about addiction were instead confronted with surrealism, dream logic, and Kafkaesque bureaucracy. The film alienated precisely the people it needed to court. Yet, over time, cinephiles and scholars have revisited it as one of Kashyap’s most daring experiments — a film that dared to reject the commercial grammar of Bollywood. The refusal to explain itself, the disjointed narrative, the surreal atmosphere: these weren’t flaws, but deliberate acts of resistance. Kashyap seemed to be telling his viewers — and by extension, the censor board and state — that he would not play by their rules.
Addiction as allegory
John Abraham’s K is not merely a smoker grappling with addiction, but a man ensnared in the gears of authoritarian control—where desire is punished, identity erased, and obedience demanded. Years before today’s anxieties over surveillance, cancel culture, and state censorship, Kashyap imagined a waking nightmare that encompassed them all. By transforming one man’s refusal to quit smoking into a surreal parable of submission and erasure, he crafted a film that eerily anticipated our present—a world where freedom is not extinguished with brute force, but through contracts, compromises, and the quiet suffocation of consent.
The Prayogshala rehab, run by the menacing Baba Bengali, operates like a totalitarian state. Every act of disobedience carries a punishment: the loss of a finger, the death of a loved one, or the erasure of self. By the end, K is stripped of identity, his desire literally beaten out of him. Kashyap presents smoking as a metaphor for dissent — and dissent must be crushed at any cost. This is the core allegory: authoritarianism thrives on policing desire. The cigarette becomes a symbol of dissent. K’s insistence on smoking is not about nicotine but about resisting control. Each punishment he endures is a metaphor for how authoritarian systems erase the individual piece by piece.
Kashyap’s Cinematic Rebellion
Formally, “No Smoking” is Kashyap’s rebellion against narrative comfort. Instead of tidy storytelling, he embraces surrealism and dream logic. Influences of David Lynch and Franz Kafka are evident: oppressive bureaucracies, absurd contracts, looping realities, and imagery that oscillates between mundane and nightmarish. Take the bathtub sequence, one of the film’s most unsettling moments. K, seeking comfort, sinks into his bathtub — a place of intimacy and vulnerability. Suddenly, the water becomes a portal, pulling him into an alternate reality.
The scene captures the collapse of safe spaces under authoritarian control. Even the sanctity of one’s private refuge is no longer immune from intrusion. The personal is violently politicized; the act of bathing, a private ritual, becomes a site of surveillance and punishment. The film’s refusal to provide linear cause-and-effect storytelling is not indulgence but defiance. Kashyap mirrors the irrationality of authoritarian systems: you cannot reason with them, you can only endure their absurd logic. In this sense, the very form of the film is subversive.
The Office of Baba Bengali: Bureaucracy as Violence
The scenes in Baba Bengali’s office exemplify the film’s critique of bureaucracy. The space itself is surreal: an enormous, dimly lit room, filled with clerks and paperwork, where contracts are signed with ritualistic seriousness. Baba Bengali presides like a judge, priest, and dictator rolled into one. This imagery is not accidental. Bureaucracy in authoritarian states often replaces morality with procedure. K is not persuaded to quit smoking; he is coerced into compliance through endless forms, contracts, and punishments.
The office embodies how systems of power disguise violence under the cloak of legality. Every authoritarian regime justifies itself not through ethics but through paperwork. In one memorable exchange, Baba Bengali reminds K that he signed willingly — as though consent given under coercion is genuine. This is a biting critique of how authoritarianism manufactures consent while stripping it of all meaning.
Alex the Cigar Seller: The Seduction and Castration of Desire
Alex, the Cuban cigar seller, emerges as one of the film’s most intriguing figures. On the surface, he is simply a tempter — dangling exotic cigars before K, reminding him that desire can never be fully extinguished. But Alex also represents the cigarette companies themselves, which profit by coercing people into addiction. Kashyap makes this clear with a sly detail: Alex’s cigars bear the brand name Fidel Castrated.
It’s a bitter pun — evoking both Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader associated with cigars, and the violence of castration. In No Smoking’s logic, if forcing people not to smoke results in the mutilation of fingers, then coercing people into smoking is a form of castration — a symbolic emasculation, a mutilation of autonomy disguised as pleasure. Alex embodies this paradox: the lure of desire and the violence hidden within it. Through him, Kashyap critiques not only authoritarian suppression but also capitalist exploitation, showing that both systems strip individuals of agency in different ways.
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Zero Minute: Institutionalizing Sin
One of the film’s most striking concepts is “Zero Minute,” the loophole in Baba Bengali’s system where all sins and vices are momentarily permitted for a specified period. At first glance, it seems like freedom, but it is actually the opposite — freedom commodified, rationed, and doled out by authority. By institutionalizing sin, Baba Bengali demonstrates total mastery: even rebellion must occur on his terms. The very act of vice, once an expression of autonomy, is now subsumed into the machinery of control. Kashyap uses Zero Minute as a devastating metaphor for how authoritarian regimes often absorb dissent, offering token spaces for “resistance” that are in fact carefully monitored safety valves. In Baba Bengali’s world, even your sins are state-sanctioned.
The Siberia Sequence: Exile as Control
Midway through the film, K finds himself inexplicably transported to Siberia. The snow-covered wasteland, populated by faceless workers, feels like another world — yet it is part of the same machinery of control. The Siberia sequence functions as an allegory for exile. Throughout history, authoritarian regimes have used exile, banishment, and isolation to discipline dissenters. K’s dislocation to Siberia emphasizes the global reach of authoritarianism: there is no escape, no outside.
The punishment is not just physical but existential. He is displaced from his culture, stripped of language, and surrounded by alien coldness. The surrealism of this scene — K’s sudden transport without explanation — mirrors the arbitrary cruelty of authoritarian systems. People disappear overnight; families are torn apart; individuals find themselves in prisons or labor camps without reason. Siberia, in the film, becomes shorthand for the absurd extremity of state violence.
The Ending Fog: Souls in the Gas Chamber
The climax of “No Smoking” is one of the most chilling sequences in Kashyap’s filmography. K is no longer simply punished with mutilation or exile — he is stripped of his very body. We see souls trapped in a dilapidated prison, writhing in anguish, separated from their physical selves. Their disembodiment is not liberation but entrapment, a vision of eternal submission.
What makes this sequence even more disturbing is its explicit evocation of Nazi atrocities. Earlier in the film, Baba Bengali is shown in a photograph standing beside Adolf Hitler, and he even boasts that the gas chamber he uses was a gift from Hitler himself. The fog that surrounds K in the end is not metaphorical mist but the poisonous vapor of extermination — a direct allusion to the Holocaust. Kashyap here equates authoritarian control with genocidal violence, suggesting that censorship and coercion, left unchecked, lead not just to erasure of identity but to annihilation.
The ending denies any possibility of catharsis. K’s soul, like countless others, is dissolved into nothingness, his individuality erased in a collective haze of control. By invoking the imagery of gas chambers, Kashyap forces us to confront the terrifying continuum between everyday authoritarian discipline and historical atrocities. The fog is not just a surreal atmosphere — it is the smoke of mass erasure.
Why It’s More Relevant Today
Back in 2007, “No Smoking” felt like a miscalculation — too abstract, too alienating. But today, it feels prophetic. Across the world, dissenting voices — journalists, activists, filmmakers — face increasing suppression. Governments police morality in the name of public order. Surveillance capitalism ensures that our desires are tracked, quantified, and manipulated. The metaphor of smoking resonates more now than ever. It can stand for any personal freedom under threat: the right to speak, to create, to love, to resist, to live without intrusion. The film’s allegory of authoritarian control reads less like a nightmare and more like a documentary of the present.
Conclusion
“No Smoking” is Anurag Kashyap’s strangest, boldest, and most misunderstood film. But beneath its surreal surface lies his sharpest critique of censorship and authoritarianism. It reminds us that control doesn’t always announce itself with guns and soldiers. Sometimes it arrives with contracts, paperwork, and the slow suffocation of choice. In Kashyap’s nightmare, K loses his fingers for holding onto a cigarette. In ours, we risk losing our voices for holding onto our freedom. The question isn’t whether “No Smoking” was ahead of its time. The question is whether we, nearly two decades later, are finally ready to see it for what it is: a prophecy we ignored.
