City of Joy [La Cité de la Joie] 1992

Whatever is not given is lost. (Indian proverb) Few places in the world swarm like Calcutta, with its three thousand shanty towns, its fifty thousand rickshaw pullers, its hundreds of bazaars, its eleven million inhabitants. A peasant named Hasari Pal, forced to abandon his drought-parched plot of land, drifts one day into this mirage of a city. At that very moment, on the other side of the planet, a little girl's heart stops beating on an operation table in a Houston hospital. The young surgeon, Max Lowe, is so traumatized by the tragedy that he dicides to abadon his career. He leaves for India, hoping to reconcile himself to his fate and find a meaning to life.