Kahaani, the story

I had been waiting for the release of the hindi movie, Kahaani, since the last few months but could not go to watch it while it was still running in a nearby theatre. I finally got to watch this movie on my laptop sometime last week. After the movie got over, my first reaction was: paise bach gaye! I mean, the movie is not bad at all, but it is definitely not as great as portrayed by all the hype around it. I wonder if this movie would have been this big a hit if it was not riding on the recent success of Vidya Balan in The Dirty Picture.

The story of Kahaani is pretty decent. But what seems ridiculous is the ending. Some random female faking a enlarged tummy who manages to trap and kill a highly trained terrorist is a bit hard to take. It is surely true that "where there is a will, there is a way", but I think Bollywood should start giving at least some respect to the abilities of the villains. It reminds me of the movies in which one single Bollywood hero is enough to fight an army of trained assassins. I am still wondering how could Sujoy Ghosh have such a ridiculous ending for an otherwise nice movie.

Vidya of course is a great actress and she did a very good job in Kahaani. And the character of Bob Biswas was fabulous too and played very well by Saswata Chatterjee. However, the roles of Rana and Khan could have been done better. Both of them looked very weak in some scenes. For the role of Khan, it might have been better to take Avay Devgan or Nana Patekar. And for Rana, Nakul Vaid might have been a better choice. Just to remind you, Nakul is the one who played the role of Jatin Shukla in the movie Ab Tak Chhappan.

Despite being low on modern development, Kolkata has a very strong charm. And Kahaani does a very good job of reminding Indians of the city that was once the centre of many great ideas and movements in India. However, the idea of a high profile terrorist attack in the city seems a bit out of place. And it also does not make sense for the terrorist to remain in Kolkata even after the bombings. But yes, Kolkata is a good hiding place. It would have sounded more realistic if the bombings took elsewhere and Vidya was led to Kolkata through some clues offered by investigations of Col. Bajpai.

Coming back to the ending. What could have been a better way to conclude the story? One thing for sure is that Vidya Bagchi should have been actually pregnant. Its the pregnancy that acts weight to the whole sequence of events. If Vidya is not pregnant, what is so great in whatever she did till the end? And to think that Milan Damji would fall for it only to be killed in the end is too ridiculous. If it was so easy to kill terrorists, India would not have been spending billions of dollars on defence every year. Sujoy Ghosh should borrow some honesty from Farhan Akhtar. Farhan also does not have a good ending for his Don series, and so he keeps making sequels. It would have surely  been a farce if Kahaani ended with the line "Milan ko pakadna mushkil hi nahin, namumkin hai", but it would have been more realistic to show him die in a fight with cops rather than a pin from the leading lady's hair.