As I was idling on Social media over the weekend, I chanced upon this video of BR Chopra 's interview with his younger brother Yash Chopra where he talks about the only remake in his lifetime - Dastan , which was a remake of his own movie Afsana . And that took me down the rabbit hole ...   As I researched more about Afsana, I discovered that it was a trend setter in many ways: first of ' double role ' with identical twin brothers separated in childhood, an oft-used plot in Indian Cinema;  second one of the first to use the international literature [notably its plot is inspired by The Corsican Brothers ]; and third, a pioneer in Film Noir category in Hindi cinema. What impressed me is that the movies were so well integrated with what was happening on the global scene (even though adapted to the Indian audience). I set out to search more on this subject of how Indian cinema was inspired by literature and film making of the rest of the world. So let me take you through my...