'Parched' is much more than a film

Moving and counter-enforcing gender stereotypes, there is a stirring stimulating energetic and erotic energy flowing out of "Parched", as though the storyteller decides to pull out all stops to let her women characters speak their minds and act out their innermost fantasies, including one of the female heroes strange visit to a 'Mystic Baba' (Adil Hussain, suitably magnetic) who impregnates her. The sequence, a highpoint in the hoary history of female eroticism in Hindi cinema, is shot with a spiritual grace.