Ajantrik

Ajantrik
Directed by	Ritwik Ghatak
Written by	Subodh Ghosh (short story) Ritwik Ghatak (story elaboration)
Starring	Kali Banerjee Shriman Deepak Kajal Gupta Keshto Mukherjee
Music by	Ali Akbar Khan
Cinematography	Dinen Gupta
Edited by	Ramesh Joshi
Production company	L. B Films International
Release date	23 May 1958
Running time	104 min.
Country	India
Language	Bengali

Ajantrik (known internationally as The Unmechanical, The Mechanical Man or The Pathetic Fallacy) is a 1958 Indian Bengali film written and directed by parallel filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak. The film is adapted from a Bengali short story of the same name written by Subodh Ghosh.

A comedy-drama film with science fiction themes, it is one of the earliest Indian films to portray an inanimate object, in this case an automobile, as a character in the story. It achieves this through the use of sounds, recorded during post-production, to emphasize the car's bodily functions and movements. The protagonist Bimal can be seen as an influence on the cynical cab driver Narasingh (played by Soumitra Chatterjee) in Satyajit Ray's Abhijan (1962), which in turn served as a prototype for the character of Travis Bickle (played by Robert De Niro) in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976).

The film was considered for a special entry in the Venice Film Festival in 1959.

Bimal is a taxi-driver in a small provincial town. He lives alone, his taxi (an old 1920 Chevrolet jalopy which he named Jagaddal) is his only companion and, although very battered, it is the apple of Bimal's eye. The film shows episodes from his life in the industrial wasteland, delivering people from one place to another.