Anupam Kher in 'Calorie' | The weight of loss
In Calorie, his 540th film, Anupam Kher plays Mohan Singh who navigates loss, silence, misunderstanding, and buried hurt
Sitting under the yellow haze of the hotel’s wall lamp, Anupam Kher talks gently about grief, an emotion that is every mortal being’s ill-fated companion. Kher acknowledges grief with sincerity. He knows that tragedy never works around a timetable; things get broken, and the anguish of loss is perennial. Grief is palpable, tangible and, sadly, everywhere.
Sitting under the yellow haze of the hotel’s wall lamp, Anupam Kher talks gently about grief, an emotion that is every mortal being’s ill-fated companion. Kher acknowledges grief with sincerity. He knows that tragedy never works around a timetable; things get broken, and the anguish of loss is perennial. Grief is palpable, tangible and, sadly, everywhere.
That evening, grief was not a coincidental conversation starter; it lay at the heart of Kher’s 540th film Calorie, which had its international premiere at the 56th International Film Festival of India (IFFI), Goa, in the prestigious Cinema of the World category. Calorie does not borrow grief from imagination; it stems from real-life tragedy and the personal bereavement of Eisha Marjara, the film’s writer and director, the 1985 bombing of Air India flight 182, which exploded midair killing all 329 passengers. Marjara’s mother and younger sister left Montreal for India and were killed on that flight.
2025 marks the 40th anniversary of the bombing—a tragedy that inevitably left an indelible imprint on Marjara, her family, and on the families and friends of the victims. When Kher was approached to play Mohan Singh in Calorie, he was drawn to the honesty and emotional truth of Marjara’s storytelling. “It had been nearly 40 years since the bombing, but the anguish of loss was inescapable in her eyes,” Kher reminisced.
“Calorie is a deeply human story that goes beyond borders. It captures the intersection of culture and belonging, blending the universal themes of family, love and loss. Conflict is at the heart of filmmaking, and these stories must be told. Perhaps, for the storyteller, filmmaker, these stories are cathartic, a medium to purge the remnants of loss that often moulder in an invisible corner of our hearts,” Kher elaborated.
Calorie traces three generations of women as they confront their shared past and buried secrets during a transformative summer in India. The story follows Monika, a stressed single mother who sends her two teenage daughters to visit their relatives in India, hoping the trip will reconnect them with their Punjabi roots. What begins as a reluctant visit soon unravels into a powerful journey of identity, healing, and rediscovery across continents and generations.
Calorie seems an anomalous title for an intergenerational story that excavates the complicated and entangled relationship daughters have with their mothers. But the title is not referring to the standard unit of energy in nutrition; instead, it is a metaphorical title, referring to themes of energy, consumption, nourishment, or the emotional ‘weight’ of the family’s past.
“Forty-one years as an actor and 540 films. How would you define Mohan Singh?” I ask Kher. Sitting cross-legged on a beige sofa, Kher brought grief back to the colloquy. “Grief set my filmography in motion with Saaransh (1984), the despair of B.B. Pradhan, a retired headmaster, confronting the tragedy of his only son’s death in New York. Grief turned B.B. Pradhan into a rebel, but Mohan Singh is an ordinary man dealing with buried hurt in a conventional way. However, Mohan Singh lent another dimension to my craft.” Kher elaborates: “Having been in films for 41 years, I can make characters come easily to me. Competency is the greatest villain of brilliance, but I don’t let it overpower the craft. I want to make the process difficult to add nuanced layers. That’s what I did for Mohan Singh.”
Brilliance is tangible through the film’s one-hour-47-minute runtime, and it expectedly won the Best Feature, Best Director and Best Actor awards during its Canadian Premiere at the IFFSA Toronto Festival.
Kher believes that not every film is made for box office success, and films like Calorie should make the rounds of film festivals. “Film festivals are absolutely essential for filmmakers. Directors, writers, producers, actors from across the world gather at these festivals, and it is important that these human stories get noticed,” Kher adds.
The evening was getting dark, and Kher was still bathed in the haze of the yellow lamp, speaking gently about Calorie, the perils of existence and the exhilaration of films. He acknowledges that grief cannot be erased, but no matter how enormous the ‘emotional weight’ of loss, life rejigs itself and grief is no longer an ill-fated companion but an obligatory configuration.