Last evening, I saw a film. Hotel Rwanda. It made me speechless.

The film, made in 2004 by Terry George, is set in Rwanda in 1994. It deals with the genocide stemming from the Hutu-Tutsi rivalry. I remember the clashes. I was working in The Telegraph then. I remember Joydeep, our foreign desk chief, getting agitated about the Hutu-Tutsi in-fighting and insisting on taking it on the foreign pages. We used to laugh about this then. Last evening, a line from the film, "They watch it (the carnage) on television, say 'My God', and then continue with their dinners", was like a slap across my conscience.

The film, based on a true story, is about Paul Rusesabagina (portrayed excellently by Don Cheadle), a manager at the Belgian-owned 4-star Hotel Des Milles Collines at Kigali. He is intelligent, suave, and resourceful, knowing exactly how to please his patrons. He is also a family man, with feet planted firmly in the grim reality, a man who's willing to go that extra mile, but only for his own kin. Initially, despite his wife's pleas, he refuses to be drawn into the ethnic friction because of a neighbour. Because he knows he risks his own loved ones then. But as the situation in the country spirals out of control, he finds himself sheltering, by hook or by crook, over a thousand persecuted Tutsis in the hotel. He averts a massacre almost every moment, yet lives with the realisation that he himself, along with his family and all those he sheltered, can be wiped out in one fell sweep.

The film invites comparison with Spielberg's Schindler's List. Here, too, is a man whose thoughts are as far removed from philanthropy as Oskar Schindler's. But here, too, he shows exemplary courage and humanity in rescuing the hunted. However, the holocaust unleashed by the Nazis are much, much better known and represented among the creative arts than the Rwandan genocide. Herein, lies the crucial difference between the two films. The Third World perspective, with the current Western powers refusing to intervene and stop the killing, is much more hard hitting than Poland during the second World War, with help from the Allied forces almost a shout away.

Hotel Rwanda was a harrowing experience. It was also a memorable experience. A film that everyone should see.