In an age when more and more senseless, tasteless films are churned out week after week in the name of entertainment, it’s a relief to watch a film like ’’Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara’’. The film is directed by the acclaimed Assamese director Jahnu Barua who has made a film in Hindi for the first time, maybe to reach out to a larger viewership (hope he doesn’t abandon his homeland, for regional cinema often becomes poorer) and he succeeds in making us take note of this simple yet beautiful film. Who says good cinema has died a slow death with the end of the parallel or serious cinema movement - filmmakers like Barua, Shyam Benegal, Aparna Sen, Govind Nihalani or Ketan Mehta are still struggling to survive with their projects passionately amidst all the mediocrity and mindlessness. It is a relief to see films like ’’Iqbal’’, ’’My Brother...Nikhil’’, ’’Mangal Pandey - The Rising’’ and, now, ’’Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Maara’’ - all released in this very year. The film follows the travails of a distraught professor battling with the onset of dementia. The old man (played by Anupam Kher) gradually gets engulfed in memory loss as well as acute psychotic delusion. He believes that he was the one who had killed Mahatma Gandhi, but he was just a little boy at the time Gandhi was assassinated and he keeps asserting that he didn’t knowingly do so. His condition keeps worsening and his daughter (played by Urmila Matondkar) and his two sons ( the eldest son, living in the U.S., is played by Rajit Kapoor, and the youngest one is played by newcomer Addy) are at their wit’s end. It is the daughter, who shares a special bond with her father, who suffers the most and through her perspective only that the film unfolds. Parvin Dabas plays the the role of a compassionate doctor and Boman Irani, Prem Chopra and Waheeda Rahman have small roles in the film. It is a film that has multiple serious issues at its core but there hasn’t been an effort to hammer them down. The moments of dramatic tension do not make the narrative overtly maudlin. Serious viewers as well as those on the lookout for sensible cinema, disenchanted with the average dose of masala, sleaze & violence, would surely find this film (dedicated to the Father of the Nation) a welcome change.