Shilajit Mitra

Shabana Azmi is the fiery queenpin of a female outfit. They ply a disreputable trade. Her underlings feel the heat of her glare. She suffers no fools. I’m talking, of course, about a film called Mandi, directed by the late, great Shyam Benegal and released in 1983. Its coolness remains unsurpassed, 42 years on. Dabba Cartel, a new Netflix crime series with Azmi again at the helm, tries its best to be cool. Co-created by Shibani Akhtar, the show has a novel core: a home chef’s dabba (tiffin) delivery business spirals into a perilous drug operation. The pin-balling narrative is tugged along over seven episodes. The characters are stock, but, coming at you in numbers, they keep up a busy rhythm, like players on a revolving stage. It has the mark of an Excel production: ample efficiency, not a lot of excellence.

Some films suffer from a surfeit of ambition. Others—like Ashwni Dhir’s Hisaab Barabar—have none to begin with. A middling comedy about the middle class, it tracks a common man’s crusade against fraudulent banking practices. A modest, toothless satire, the film boasts sitcom staging and visuals, lacking cinematic bite. No wonder it’s streaming on ZEE5, a platform with a near-magnetic affinity for mediocrity. It’s like one of those spec scripts that lie around in production offices gathering dust; until, one day, for some inexplicable reason, they are hurriedly greenlit. Radhe Mohan Sharma (R Madhavan) is a senior ticketing inspector with the Indian Railways. Blessed with an accountant’s eye (and ethics), he spends hours pouring over his bank statements, fishing for discrepancies. When an alarmingly high sum of ₹27.50 doesn’t tally up in his books, Radhe raises a complaint with the bank. The officials he corners first feign ignorance, then try to fob him and other customers off with compensatory gifts.

Reunions are always bittersweet. And then there is Sudip Sharma’s idea of a reunion. In the new season of Paatal Lok, Hathi Ram Chaudhary (Jaideep Ahlawat) first catches sight of his old pal Ansari (Ishwak Singh) at a morgue. Ansari was once his junior at their inconsequential Outer Jamna Paar police station. Now, though, as a hotshot IPS officer working the big cases, he commands respect. Hathi Ram stands off and stares, resisting contact. A team-up is imminent, but the morbidity of the setting makes it poignant. The Hathi Ram-Ansari friendship is our anchor in Season 2. Created by Sudip Sharma, the first season of Prime Video’s crime series was a pandemic hit—a grim, coruscating procedural, kaleidoscopic in its scale and scope, picking up hot-button topics like caste violence and Islamophobia. The second season is subtler and less combative, subduing commentary in favour of human relations. At times, it becomes a touching meditation on male bonds. When Hathi Ram’s name comes up during a briefing, Ansari corrects his higher-up that he is not an ‘SHO’, just an ordinary inspector. He isn’t being cruel or conceited, just realistic about their differing vantage points.

In the 1920s, a young George Orwell was posted in Burma, as part of the Indian Imperial Police. In a famous essay titled A Hanging — written, in all likelihood, from lived experience — Orwell describes the morning of a prison execution. His unnamed narrator contrasts the minutiae of prison life with the moral shock of capital punishment. “It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man,” he writes. There is a touch of the young Orwell in Sunil (Zahan Kapoor), a rookie jailer finding his feet in Tihar, Asia’s largest and most dreaded prison. Set in the 80s, Vikramaditya Motwane and Satyanshu Singh’s series is based on the non-fiction book Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer. The real Sunil Gupta, who co-authored the book with journalist Sunetra Choudhury, was a former superintendent of Tihar, while doubling as its press relations officer and legal adviser. In his decades at the jail, Gupta oversaw the execution of several high-profile criminals, including Delhi child murderers Billa-Ranga and Kashmiri separatist Maqbool Bhat. He spoke candidly to Choudhury about his experiences. Once you put a face to the stat, how long can you look away?

“I won’t allow anything more than a friendship,” decrees Anila (Kani Kusruti), a very mom thing to say. She is sizing up a tall, sweet boy, Srinivas (Kesav Binoy Kiron), who’s drawn her daughter’s affections at their elite, hillside boarding school. The girl, Mira (Preeti Panigrahi), stands at the door and listens. The camera mimics her watchful gaze. It is a simple domestic intervention, yet it thrums with suspense.

In an interview that went viral ahead of The Sabarmati Report, actor Vikrant Massey, briefly turning political analyst, reflected on the state of the nation. “People say that Hindus are in danger, that Muslims are in danger. No one is in danger; everything is going fine. This is the best country to live in the world,” he declared in a podcast. The nervous naivety of Hindi film actors ahead of a controversial release is always enlightening to witness. It’s a balancing act no gymnast or slackliner can fathom.

There was a time, not long ago, when Hindi blockbuster cinema could stand on its own — distinguishable, say, from mythological soap operas and tacky non-fiction programming on satellite TV. But the laziness and opportunism of the last few years have all but vaporized that distinction. It leaves the theatre-going audience in two minds. Adipurush (2023) was laughably inept yet insistently pious and grim. The same applies to Singham Again, ostensibly an action potboiler and an Avengers-like ‘team-up’ movie but playing like an ad for the tourism ministry’s Ramayana trail.

Love, Sitara begins with a nod to Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” says Sitara (Sobhita Dhulipala). Unlike Leo Tolstoy’s great novel — whose opening line these words are — the writing in Vandana Kataria’s film isn’t as quotable, though it tries hard. You can assemble a slim volume of pithy self-help slogans from Abbas and Hussain Dalal’s dialogue: “Happiness lies in honesty.” “Dysfunction means they are making an effort.” “I’ll fix myself, before I can fix my relationships.”