In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989)

“In which Annie..” is a telefilm, which was conceived and written by Arundhati Roy, who played Radha’s role in the movie. Pradip Krishen directed the film and Arjun Raina played the lead role of Annie.

In the film, Annie, an architecture student struggling to finish school, comes up with an idea to put two water jets on the sides of each train in India, as his thesis project. The result is thousands of kilometers of fruit trees along the railway lines all over the country. The good-natured Annie’s harebrained schemes are the “those ones” of the title – hippy-dippy fantasies of using architecture to be of some use to society.

Were Annie to be released today, the casual profanity would be bleeped out and an anti-smoking health advisory would be plastered to the right-hand corner of the screen. Pradip Krishen’s film was made for television in a more tolerant and less divisive age, when it was perfectly alright to show students in their skivvies and thumbing their nose at authority. The National Film Awards for Annie were richly deserved, and their return makes perfect sense too.

The film was also one of Shah Rukh Khan's first movies, and the film features him for about a minute or so.

The film portrays how 'just doing it for the sake of passing' is considered more important over pitching ideas that seem much richer but are not entertained because of personal grievances between Annie and the professor.

Set in the campus of School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), Delhi, the film was based on life in an architecture college, way before engineering college films became popular in India. And since then, we have seen very few to almost no films on the struggles in an architecture college in India. Architecture has very little penetration in the Indian society as a profession. India is still high on engineering. From the Doordarshan logo design origination from NID (National Institute of Design) Ahmedabad to the design of the new parliament building by Bimal Patel, design still remains the least represented field in the country, almost neglected.

Arjun Raina as Annie