Movie Review: 'Kai Po Che!'

Bollywood-loving audience has always welcomed male friendship trio; for instance - Dil Chahta Hai, 3-idiots, ZNMD, etc. and this time around, when B-town has flung one more of its kind to join this club, I clearly see Kai Po Che! striking friendly chords among the youth.

The story begins with the ending of the twentieth century in Ahmedabad, showing three close friends with varied characteristics, struggling to make livelihood. Govind (Raj Kumar Yadav) is a serious, career-conscious, penny-measuring baniya with lots of plans running in his head of how to set up a sports shop that can provide cricket coaching along with selling sports goods. Omi (Amit Sadh) manages to get finances from his maternal uncle, a political brain who very desperately wants this son of a respected Hindu priest to join his pack and gain him political mileage. Ishaan (Sushant Singh Rajput), a cricket fanatic is a district-level cricket player, has been a victim of dirty politics of selectors and turned into a slaphappy short fuse. He comes across a gifted batsman in the form of a little Muslim kid, Ali and determines to make him a national player what he couldn't be. While all the friends enjoy their baby-steps towards their dream of a successful venture, Omi slowly gets called in the politics. On one hand when Ishaan, an ideal mentor, teaches the batting strokes to Ali, on the other, his equally strong-willed sister teaches love lessons to her Maths teacher, Govind. The new century kicks in with two of the major blows that Gujarat has ever had - severe earthquake and flaming communal riots following it in the subsequent year. The former cracks their dream and the latter, relations. They are all compelled to put their priorities in order and then one comes up against the other. They get locked into the unsolvable maze of rigid emotions. All of them try to get free of those complex threads of inexplicable relations and yes, they are able to do so.  Their enviable friendship eventually wins over their mutual differences, but only after having paid an unbearable price!

Under the direction of Abhishek Kapoor, actors are bound to take off their shirts and jump off the highest point to plunge into the huge water body; like we have seen in Rock On, here too the boys repeat the same stunts in Diu. The scenes that kept lingering in my head were the ones when Ishaan and Omi wash away their grudges after running up the streets, hugging, dancing and cheering when India wins a cricket match; and when Ishaan and his sister fight and reconcile in their own sweet ways. All the actors do full justice to their given roles and infuse believable characters they are given to perform. Hats off to the team for pulling off the hearty story in the heart of the hard realities. Go, watch the movie. Its good story, responsible acting and a lovely song Manja by Amit Trivedi, all more than make up for an easily ignorable slowness the movie carries in bits and pieces and a couple of Gujarati dialogues without sub-titles that might cark Non-Gujaratis.