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Growing up, I had two working parents. My father, during his morning shifts, would leave for work at dawn, while my mother, catching a few extra hours of sleep, would wake around seven to get me ready for school before heading to her own job which lasted till the evening. During the night shifts, dad would leave right after dinner. Even their day-offs didn't match. So at any point, they spent only a few hours together. Their routines intersected briefly over hurried meals or a few words exchanged in passing, but their lives largely ran parallel to each other.
As I grew older, I realized this to be this to be the nature of marriage. Two people, despite years of companionship, often drift into their own orbits. They meet at certain points, emotionally and physically, before diverging again, carrying separate burdens and personal rituals. The navigation of two different worlds, both personal and shared, is something that filmmaker Varun Tandon explores in his award-winning short film, 'Thursday Special'.
In the short film, Ram and Shakuntala have been married for 27 years. They have a weekly ritual together, which is based on their shared love for food. But one day when this years-long tradition is disrupted and the walls of their individual worlds collide, they meet each other, figuratively, for the first time in a very long time. Both Ram and Shakuntala have their little pockets of joy, as well as their own ways of making each other happy. But in the divide between living for oneself and another person lies the true equation of the relationship.
At the Küstendorf Film Festival 2025, Thursday Special received the award for The Most Poetic Film from the celebrated Serbian filmmaker, Emir Kusturica. Having watched the short film, the title of the award seems most befitting. Ram and Shakuntala's special ritual is the promise through which Varun maps the emotional geography of their relationship. He uses a quaint married life to construct insightful narratives on companionship grief and vulnerability.
Thursday Special is particularly poignant in the way it approaches the idea of reconciliation. When a deeply ingrained pattern is disrupted, the film’s protagonists, are forced to confront the emotional distance that had crept into their marriage. The film tackles this without a dramatic undoing; and makes use of a quiet moment of reckoning that is all the more powerful because of its simplicity.
Varun Tandon, with previous acclaimed works like 'Syaahi' and 'Gulcharrey', has a knack for finding poetry in the mundane. His latest work is no different. Thursday Special reminds us that in long-term companionship, two people can exist in their own silos for years and still find their way back to each other. And in those moments, something quiet yet extraordinary happens: they meet in the middle. Their ruses melt away they experience a moment of truth together which ultimately is the cornerstone of a real relationship.
Follow Varun here.
