The dapper Indian Air Force Squadron Leader steps out of his Scotland apartment with a bouquet in his hand to meet the girl and her Hindu-Muslim family....the girl waits endlessly but the SQLdr does not turn up....it seems the Kargil war broke out and he was summoned back to India for combat duty in such clinical, ruthless , efficient manner that he can't even tell the waiting girl and her family..... ( it is quite another matter that IAF can't take care of its fighter planes , having crashed more than 350 of them in the last 2 decades while on routine training missions) ...this is the tipping point so to speak, for what follows is an inane chase to locate each other which consumes a good part of the wretched film......
The Muslim girl first wears a burqa in her her entry shot and then switches effortlessly to western skirts and she lives in a house with two Dad-like persons, one Hindu and one Muslim.....and then there is the Mumbai Bomb blast ( of the 1993 vintage - one needs to be specific as there are so many of them....one thing we can proudly say about Mumbai is that it faces less violence than karachi ! Does that make RAW more effective than ISI ? Moot point....) and presto, the Hindu-Muslim family seamlessly relocates to Scotland to open a shop run by this secular family.....
SqLdr flies fighter planes and attacks the Tiger Hills area in Kargil and we see a blaze of digitally- created blast and fire over the snow-capped Himalayas..... then having managed to land a burning aircraft, he is injured and his left hand is paralysed..... we next see him holidaying in Switzerland ( lesser mortals get decommissioned but our Shahid Kapoor is acting in his Pop's film, may I remind you !)....
Then the Gujarat riots break out and miraculously ( for the viewers, that is) the boy and the girl meet , surrounded by arson and arsonists and for all the bad press that Modi routinely gets, I think this union should tilt the balance in his favour, no matter how very slightly and prove beyond doubt that he is a secularist.....
Shahid and Anil Kapoor's daughter ( she should rightly be called Nil Kapoor) ham their way through the story set in the 90s..... the coy love , the exchanging of letters and the endless wait to unite : all this stuff sold well a few decades back but will it enthuse the facebook/iphone/sms generation, brought up as it is on instant gratification and shoot-n- scoot philosophy ? I bet not......
There are diverse opinions whether Pankaj Kapoor is a great actor or not but on his directorial capability, there will not be any such dispute ! He is absoutely in 180 degree synch with the mood of the time.....
If some one were to offer you free tickets, better instead watch a re-run of the recent IND-ENG test series or Modiji's 3-day fast... this Mausam is off-colour and no off-season discount should lure you into watching it ......
RSK
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