Hisaab Barabar

Radhe Mohan Sharma, a railway ticket checker, stumbles upon a minor discrepancy in his bank account, setting off a chain of events, leading him to uncover a massive financial fraud orchestrated by a powerful banker named Micky Mehta, the founder of Do Bank. While unearthing a billion-dollar scam and facing immense pressure and threats, Radhe does what it takes to expose the truth.

Have you spared a minute to check if your bank balance has an insignificant discrepancy? Would you invest precious time and energy to make the bank accountable for Rs 27.50? It’s precisely this common customer lethargy that makes suave and merry Micky Mehta (Neil Nitin Mukesh) make dizzy sums like Rs 20,000 crore. Small amounts that don’t tally, interest credited just a day later, inconsequential figures that account holders ignore. Micky preys on just this customer ignorance to live life like a party. But there’s always one aam insaan whose brain works like a calculator. Senior Ticket Collector Radhe Mohan Sharma (R Madhavan) arrives laden with oranges that he generously shares with passengers. “I don’t touch stolen goods,” huffs passenger P Subhash (Kirti Kulhari). His enthusiastic reply about taking oranges to balance what the fruit seller owed him as change, delightfully introduces Radhe’s quirk. Debits and credits must tally. He’d once rejected a marriage proposal too because the girl was weak in Maths.

An honest-to-a-fault, maths-whizz ticket collector gets embroiled, unwittingly, in the doings of a greedy banker: this one-line premise may have sounded exciting on paper, but the execution comes off contrived and clunky. Madhavan plays Radhe Mohan Sharma, who brings his affable self and a razor sharp brain to his job, whose first encounter with a comely cop (Kirti Kulhari) isn’t exactly a meet-cute. She rebuffs his offer of an orange bought from a fruit-seller at the station: ‘main chori kiye santare nahin khati’, she says.

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.