What does it mean to be a man?

The bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, is a rich tradition in world cinema and literature. It occupies a paradox at the heart of human experience — adolescence is the period we live most intensely and understand least while we are in it. We can only truly comprehend it in retrospect, through stories and memories. But more than nostalgia, the form is sociologically revealing: the young protagonist encounters gender, class, desire, and power for the first time before cynicism sets in, making the collision between the self and society unusually visible. A culture’s coming-of-age films are effectively a confession — revealing what it fears its young people are becoming and what it hopes for them instead. Kshitij Singh Rawat aka Urban Buddha’s ‘Guddu Ki Duniya’ is part of this tradition.

‘Guddu Ki Duniya’ is a distinctly contemporary Indian entry into the cinematic lineage of coming-of-age films about young men searching for themselves through teenage angst over masculinity, class anxiety, and sexuality. Echoing the emotional volatility of works like ‘Moonlight’, ‘The 400 Blows’, or ‘City of God’ in its attention to youth shaped by social circumstance, the short film follows Guddu (Rugved Nanavare), who believes that respect and adulthood require becoming an “Independent Adult Mard.” The film’s close third-person omniscient narrator gives us a peek into his psyche as he experiences the quintessential rites of passage — troubles at home between his parents, the awkward first interaction with the opposite sex during adolescence, bullying at school, the first encounters with intoxication, and growing pains — which define young adulthood in India and elsewhere.

Indian masculinity is currently under pressure from multiple directions simultaneously. On one side, decades of feminist critique have made the old performances of dominance harder to sustain without self-consciousness. On the other hand, a resurgent cultural machismo — visible in political rhetoric, in the alpha-male manosphere, and in the unironic revival of chest-thumping hypermasculinity in a certain brand of Bollywood film — actively rewards the boy who stops questioning and starts performing being “the man.” Guddu exists in that gap, and so do millions of teenagers like him, armed with smartphones, social media, peer pressure, and no reliable language for what they are actually feeling.

Set within that neo-realist urban landscape, ‘Guddu Ki Duniya’ examines how boys begin to imitate hardened versions of manhood simply to feel accepted among their peers. The film resists the urge to diagnose or redeem its protagonist — it is less interested in what Guddu should become than in the precise texture of what he is going through: the shame, the mimicry, the slow distortion of selfhood that happens during young adulthood when peer validation and acceptance is all that matters.

The short film is accompanied by ‘Guddu Ke Gaane’, an original EP — featuring Shauharty, MC Kode, and Aron Nyiro — that functions as Guddu’s inner soundscape. The music moves through hip-hop, blues-rock, and jazz textures to further complicate this intimate portrait of the modern masculinity crisis — giving voice to everything the film’s visual register deliberately withholds. Together, they form a portrait of a generation caught between the man they are told to become and the man they are.

‘Guddu Ki Duniya’ is now streaming on YouTube.

‘Guddu Ke Gaane’ is available on all major streaming platforms.

Follow @_urbanbuddha on Instagram.

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Indian Short Film ‘Chashma’ Is A Coming-Of-Age Exploration Of Societal Blind Spots