Katha | Bollywood Movie | Hindi Film Reviews

Sometimes when you look at your surroundings you may forced to think that world is not the place for straight forward and genuine people. Often you see people having the kind of over the top attitude, like to make stories of his/her own success, false claim about his/her own abilities, succeed in the real life. May be the Darwin’s rule of “survival of the fittest” applied here. The people who try pretending better, may create a better impression than those who like to do his/her work genuinely and decide not to do self-marketing but let the work speak.Is it so? So the tales of wisdom and truth only triumphs, are only made to be part of books only?!

We are familiar with the tale of a rabbit (in some versions it is hare) and tortoise we used to read when studying. The rabbit as we know runs very fast. That is indeed a very good ability. But when it got very proud and arrogant for its ability and in turn started considering other animals of the jungle lower quality ones, it became a problem. And as we know in its bet with the poor tortoise about a running race, when it reached half way in a fraction of time, it got overconfident and slept under the tree by thinking that the tortoise far away from it and it cannot make winning the race. However when the rabbit was taking the sound sleep, the tortoise crossed him and while the rabbit was sleeping late, it indeed won the race. A kind of impossible thing done!!

This way, ideally good qualities (hard work, determination and being honest to the duty) paid off.

Does that happen in real life? Well, the world is not the ideal place, no entity can be. So the examples of both kind are being seen, and we have to accept the facts.

But, in order to be good, we need to follow good. If everyone in the society does it, the world can be even better place to live.

With similar vision – Sai Paranjape’s movie Katha (release year: 1983) was made (see the titles of the movie to realize the same). The movie also refers that it is inspired by Marathi play – Sasa Aani Kasav – by S. G. Sathe.

It is the story of 3 persons mainly. The simple, humble, genuine, down-to-earth – Rajaram Purushottam Joshi. The young, beautiful, vulnerable – Sandhya Sabnis. And the charismatic, proud, selfish, self centered – Vasudev (aka Basudev or Basu or Vasu or Bashu) who used false success stories and over-the-top attitude to impress people. Being a person with helpful nature Rajaram was used and mis-used for personal favors by his neighbors, colleagues and others.

Rajaram love Sandhya but could not express that bluntly to her. Rajaram got permanent in his job and is happy for that. He got two wishes reserved for that day. Have a name plate for his door and express his love to Sandhya. He got the first thing done, but was unable to do the later. One day Basu came to visit RajaRam to stay for a while at his home. He made it like his home and you must see his attitude. He is the one who is getting help from Rajaram but behave like he is helping poor Rajaram! You definitely go to find many such people in the world around you.

The environment and way of living of a chawl (a kind of small colony of small blocks) is explored in a nice and realistic way.

During one conversation with Rajaram, Bashu found that Rajaram’s boss can be fooled easily. He is very emotional and easy to gain trust of – kind of person. In recent past
he (Mr. Dhindhoria – Rajaram’s boss) was made fool by one of his distant relative!

How Bashu plays with everyone related to Rajaram and make them impressed by him is the rest of the story. Will he be able to get what he want? What would be the fate of Rajaram and Sandhya’s (one sided) love story? You can watch the film to know.

The tale is simple yet emotional and touching. You can see the characters are all pulled form real life middle class families. The sets are authentic and so does the dialog. Nasiruddin Shah underplays his role effectively and Farooq Sheikh prooves why he is considered as one of the finest acting talents. He has been seen in simple roles mainly and Nasiruddin have played glamorous and bold roles in the career; here we can see both them swapping their kind of roles. And both are effective. Dipti plays her part. Songs are balanced (not too good and not bad). The background score is a positive addition to the movie. The climax is idealistic. We can see the effects of this film in some other films (like Kya Kehnaa, starring Preity Zinta, Chandrachoor and Saif) as well.

It would be interesting to know that it is said that Sai Paranjape was annoyed with Basu Bhattacharya, as her film – Sparsh – was delayed. So later when she made this film, she intentionally named Vasudev – as Basu Bhatt (the negative character of the movie).

Overall a nice film showing real life stuff which ends with the message that wrong things cannot be better than the right things. A good social drama, which one should go for.