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• Directed by
Abhishek Kapoor
• Produced by
Ronnie Screwvala;Siddharth Roy Kapur
• Screenplay by
Pubali Chaudhari;Supratik Sen; Abhishek Kapoor;
Chetan Bhagat
• Based on
The 3 Mistakes of My Life by Chetan Bhagat
ABOUT THE MOVIE
• Starring
Sushant Singh Rajput;Amit Sadh;Rajkummar Rao;
Amrita Puri;Asif Basra
• Music by
Amit Trivedi
• Background Score:
Hitesh Sonik
• Cinematography
Anay Goswamy Avik Mukhopadhyay
• Edited by
Deepa Bhatia Steven Bernard
ABOUT THE MOVIE
• Production company
UTV Motion Pictures
• Distributed by
UTV Motion Pictures
• Release date
22 February 2013
• Country
India
• Language
Hindi
• Budget
₹20 crore
• Box office
₹92 crore approx
COMPARISON
• The framing device of the novel which is suicide note to bhagat(the writer of the book)
from a gujrati businessman has been removed and the descision was a sensible one. A
few subpklots and some pheripheral charecters such as the Australian cricketers were
removed
• Kai Po Che! is about the gap between innocence and experience, and about how life can
scupper the best-laid plans of shiny-eyed young people. In this coming-of-age tale set
mostly in 2001-2002, the three central characters – the friends Govind, Ishaan and Omi
– are affected by various important things that happened to Gujarat and to India
during that period: the Kutch earthquake, the emergence of a mall culture with the
promise of attractive retail space and new business opportunities, the historic India-
Australia Test match in Kolkata in March 2001, and most significantly the Godhra
massacre and the anti-Muslim riots that followed it.
COMPARISON
• The book’s narrator Govind is the film’s quiet anchoring figure (extremely well-played by Raj Kumar
Yadav), a young man whose interest in Mathematics – the one certainty in a world where pretty much
everything else is ambiguous and up for discussion – was one of the more entertaining things about
the novel (it is somewhat toned down in the film). Ishaan (Sushant Singh Rajput) is a temperamental
cricket player who develops a bond with a 12-year-old Muslim boy, the extraordinarily gifted Ali. And
Omi (Amit Sadh) is falling under the influence of his uncle Bittu maama, a leader of the chauvinistic
local Hindu party.
• With this basic information, it is easy enough to guess how the lives and personal equations of these
three friends will be altered by the communal clashes – especially after Omi loses his parents in the
Godhra attack. But I thought the film’s climax was more layered and challenging than the novel’s,
partly because of how it makes Omi a participant in the riots. In the book he retains his innocence
when crunch time arrives; he even ends up taking the trishul-blow intended for the boy Ali (as you
might gather from the passage quoted above). And this allows the maama, a distant character in
whom the reader has little emotional investment (fleshing out side-characters is not one of Bhagat’s
strong suits anyway), to conveniently become the figurehead for Evil. Much of the responsibility for
the bad things that happen in the end are fobbed off on him, while the three protagonists remain
young innocents, our unsullied points of identification.
COMPARISON
•
• The film, on the other hand, has dramatic impetus (which is lacking in the final passages of the
novel) along with a more developed sense of how “good” people – or “apolitical” people – can
be engulfed by tides that they don’t fully understand. Long before Godhra, we have already seen
Omi becoming a little closed and distanced from his friends, gradually turning into a puppet for
his maama and a handsome public-relations man for the party. (Even his freshly grown
moustache underlines his new status as his uncle's minion-clone and a card-carrying member of
a group that feels the need to emphasize their masculinity because of the perception that they
have been weak for too long.
• Later, driven by personal vendetta in the climactic scenes where a Hindu mob attacks one of the
city’s Muslim quarters, he is for a while indistinguishable from the older, more hardened men
around him, and unrecognisable from the cheerful kid who helped his friends set up a sports
shop earlier in the story.
COMPARISON
•
• Manav Kaul’s thin-lipped maama is a scary figure – the sort of man whom you can
imagine planning a massacre, carefully examining the trunk-loads of scythes with
which he will slit the bellies of his enemies. But watch Omi’s face near the end of the
film – initial confusion and anguish slowly turning into watchful determination – and
you see how he might become a similarly cold-blooded rabble-rouser a few years down
the line.
• Eventually it takes a friend’s senseless murder – with his own hand on the trigger – for
Omi to regain something of his humanity, but something much deeper has been lost. In
the face of his transformation, the good guys-vs-bad guys dichotomy is no longer so
easy to believe in. And this moral ambivalence belongs mostly to the film; there is no
real parallel for it in the book.
CONCLUSION