If you were eighteen years old growing up in New Delhi, a student of cinema, a cinephile or a plain film snob, you would without question swoon over the filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak and spend endless hours in the Delhi University canteen discussing his films, his alcoholism, and his eventual death from tuberculosis. Ghatak’s life is of the sort that captures ones imagination, but his epic, A River Called Titas, will intrigue its viewer for completely different reasons. The film is a passionate elegy for a dying culture, that tells the raw and powerful story of a dying river and a dying culture. red