A number of people consider Guru Dutt the Orson Welles of India, and he was instrumental in expanding Indian cinema's commercial conventions. Pyaasa is one of his most famous movies. It was released in 1957 and wasn't immediately a commercial success; now it is one of Time magazine's 100 movies of all time. Like most Indian films, Pyaasa relies on the structure of traditional Bollywood melodrama, but it was unconventional because it focused on a sustained social critique of the shifting national and cultural order in a post-colonial India from tradition to modernity through the use of two key themes: the loneliness of the artist and the imprisonment of the artist's work within the expectations of the marketplace. In Guru Dutt's world, there were only two salient options for an artist in his era - a return to a traditional idealism or suicide. Guru Dutt's own life reflected this unresolvable tension between modernity and tradition, which culminated in his own suicide at the age of 39.