Burning with a desire to be a journalist, a young man gets his chance when a publisher -- the father of a friend -- suggests that he write a story on the daily life of the people in his house (several families worth of people). The material turns out to be too incohesive and abundant to work into a pointed, thematic article, and just when he is about to give up, his younger brother asks him a simple question: "How many coal burners are there in Calcutta?" This triggers an idea for a story about Calcutta's pollution -- and the aspiring journalist dreams of myriads of burner-toting citizens invading the publisher's home demanding redress. Maybe he is finally on the way to a story that matters.

A young man, eternally 20, walks through history, through poverty, squalor and death. Eternally 20 and killed so many times -- killed because he has been protesting and has remained an agent-provocateur. He comes and goes, between stories, each story having an independent set-up and new characters, but all stories harping on the eternal reality: Poverty and Degradation. While the physical look of poverty and hunger remains unchanged, it is the mind and attitude that keeps on changing. At the end, the young man of 20 appears on the screen again, just killed, and “incites” the spectators to react.

A young, idealistic director arrives in a village to make a picture set during the Great Bengal Famine. It’s a film that he hopes will reveal the problems and privations still current in rural India.