At a time when mainstream Bollywood movies often blur the line between cinema and propaganda and have made a very visible shift in support of majoritarian politics, Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga stands apart. Its ingenuity lies in showing us that people living across the border are not much different from us.The Wire’s Deep Mukherjee talks about how the movie takes a different avenue from mainstream Bollywood, which routinely portrays Pakistanis as the hated enemy and the villain of blockbusters such as Dhurandhar. But Imtiaz Ali reminds us with Main Vaapas Aaunga that a generation still lives among us which has seen a time when there were not two countries, but one.The film also reminds us that the religious hatred which is regularly stoked even today for electoral gains, has already destroyed millions of lives and families in 1947 and continue to do so even today. The reaction to Main Vapas Aunga has shown there is hope that this cycle of dehumanisation may not be permanent.