“Repulsion” digs ceaselessly beneath the viewer’s skin, unnerving the audience in every would-be innocuous scene after enough, hitting a constant nerve with it’s story of a sexually repressed young woman’s descent into insanity, bizarre fantasies of rape and assault defeating her previously suffocated impulses. It is an unshakable, unforgettable horror movie that beats any present-day gore-laden genre film with an effortless ease.

When Basu Bhattacharya makes a movie, his protagonists inevitably have same names - Amar and Manasi. In this film Amar (Sanjiv Kumar) and Manasi (Sharmila Tagore) are married to each other and also have a son. The wife has a dream for a bigger house. Little does she know that her husband is bored of the monotony of the marriage and is having an affair on clandestine with his secretary Sapna played by Sarika.

The first in my list is Shekhar Kapoor’s Masoom. The director opens the film with a brief backgrounder of the boy Rahul whose mother has died and an old headmaster is the only one who this boy can call his own. After the credits have rolled, the second shot is actually the stealer where the family portrait of Naseer’s family is lying on a table and a stray puppy comes and breaks it. This shot establishes the premise of the film. One outsider can disturb the harmony of the this family.

Picking your favorite films is like the predicament a child faces when he or she is asked “who do you love more, mummy or papa?” It’s a choice you hardly ever can make, or should make, yet people are unrelenting in the pursuit of that answer. Anyway getting down to movies… I think the hardest part is what film do you leave out from your list… there are so many that have made a deep impact on your consciousness, yet for want of space you can’t include in the list.