World No Tobacco Day- No Smoking

BollywooDirect
2 min readMay 31, 2020

World No Tobacco Day- No Smoking is a 2007 neo-noir psychological thriller film written and directed by Anurag Kashyap and co-produced by Vishal Bhardwaj and Kumar Mangat.

The film stars John Abraham, Ayesha Takia Azmi, Ranvir Shorey and Paresh Rawal in the lead roles, while Bipasha Basu appears in an Item number. The film is loosely based upon the short story Quitters, Inc. by Stephen King, which was previously adapted as one of three segments featured in Hollywood anthology film, Cat’s Eye (1985). It became the first Indian film to be adapted from a Stephen King short story.

The story follows K (Abraham) a self-obsessed, narcissist chain smoker who agrees to kick his habit to save his marriage and visits a rehabilitation center, but is caught in a labyrinth game by Baba Bengali (Rawal), the man who guarantees he will make him quit.

The film released worldwide on 26 October 2007 but was met with a lukewarm response from Indian critics and mixed response from overseas critics. The film did not perform well at the box office either, becoming one of the major disasters of the year. According to Kashyap, the film failed because, it was considered much ahead of its time, courtesy of its dark and unusual storyline comprising with elements of surrealism, fantasy, dream, reality, horror and dark humor which left critics and the cinema-goers baffled, this was frowned upon by Indian audiences, as it was unconventional, pretentious and they had never seen anything like it.

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