Life's Pleasures Quote by Sanjay Dutt

Kolkata gets framed here the way film crews often experience a city: as both a sensory reward and a logistical obstacle course. Sanjay Dutt opens with the diplomatic triple-compliment - great city, great food, great people - the kind of praise that plays well in print and travels safely across regions, especially in India where city pride is real and reputations are easily bruised. It is also a subtle acknowledgement of hospitality: the city as host, the actor as guest.

Then comes the tell. The "problems finding the kind of old buildings we were looking for" reads like a production note, but it carries cultural freight. Kolkata is popularly imagined as all crumbling colonial facades and nostalgic grandeur; Dutt suggests the camera-ready version is harder to locate, either because the city is modernizing, because permissions are complicated, or because the romanticized Kolkata is a curated myth. The line quietly exposes how movies hunt for "authenticity" that matches an art director's reference board, not necessarily the lived city.

"Handling the crowds" is even more loaded. Crowds can mean fans, onlookers, or the everyday density of Kolkata streets. Either way, it positions the city as intensely public, where filmmaking can't easily cordon off space. Dutt doesn't complain outright; he balances it with "on the whole it was fun", a classic star move that converts friction into charm. The subtext is pragmatic: the city is vivid and generous, but it won't shrink itself for your shoot.