Anand

Anand (1971) is Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Hindi drama, and you can watch online on iFILM. It follows a man handed a terminal diagnosis who chooses to spend his last months louder and brighter than most people manage in a lifetime.

Dr. Bhaskar Bannerjee is worn down by other people's suffering — poverty, pain, patients he can't save. Then Anand Sehgal arrives: incurably ill, yet grinning as if the doctor were the one who needed cheering up. Anand befriends strangers, hands out nicknames, meddles in everyone's lives and flatly refuses to be sad about his own. Rajesh Khanna plays him without a trace of self-pity, while a young Amitabh Bachchan is the guarded physician whose whole outlook this friendship cracks open.

Mukherjee didn't make a weepie about dying; he made a film about how one person's presence reshapes everyone around him. It sits high on lists of the greatest Indian films, and Anand's lines are still quoted across India. Heavy subject, but the ending leaves light rather than despair. Stream Anand (1971) online on iFILM.