The Bankrupts (2014)

En route a business trip, a failed film-maker turned cloth dealer Tripurari Gupta aka Trips breaks his journey in the city of Mumbai, India to meet his old film school buddy Lokesh Sharma. The intention is to lookout for a suitable script since he has got a financier now and wants to get back into film making. Lokesh is semi-established in his career. His wife Anu, also a film school graduate, is presently holed up in Ooty in India for a documentary film shoot. Lokesh takes this opportunity to narrate an ambitious script that is set in United Kingdom called 'Maternity Leave', which he claims is his. In the ensuring reunion party like situation, as Lokesh's narration unfolds over liberal doses of liquor; the past catches up with the two friends - the question of success, of failures and of a subtle comparison of individual achievements arise. Closely linked to the arguments of the two men is the omnipresent story of Anu; and the fate of a pact that the three of them had made fifteen years back - a pact that is directly linked to the question of the biological fatherhood of Anu's teenage daughter Priya, who is in a boarding school. After all these years, why actually is Trips meeting Lokesh? Not willing to change the rules of the pact and uncomfortable at disturbing the status quo, the men part ways as Trips has a train to catch. Before leaving, Trips confesses that he has no producer and that he broke his journey so that he could take a loan from Lokesh, notwithstanding his longing to see Priya. Lokesh partially obliges but in return confesses that 'Maternity Leave' is not his own script, but that of his friend Karan Bali, another film maker. For the two men, the realization of a sense of emptiness, worthlessness and bankruptcy is complete.