Movie Review Saare Jahaan Se Mehenga:It looks and feels authentic, minus exaggeration

Cast:Sanjay Mishra, VM Badola, Pragati Pandey, Ranjan Chhabra, Pramod Pathak, Zakir Hussain

Director: Anshul Sharma

IE Rating: ** 1/2

People like us like to go and on about inflation and rising costs, but the chatter is confined to newspaper headlines, and squiggly TV graphics. Poverty as a central theme has been pushed so far from our flashy multiplex obsessed times, that it is almost like encountering an alien creature when it raises its head in a film. Especially when it is done with such sincerity as it is in Saare Jahaan Se Mehenga, a film that reminds us how crushing the spiraling bhaav of the proverbial aata and daal can be.

Puttan (Mishra) works at a government-run animal husbandry outlet, helping reluctant cows and bulls to get in the family way. His bad-tempered father (Badola) hovers around blackly, cursing all comers and goers from his rocking chair on the verandah which abuts the narrow street. It is a small mohalla in a small town in Haryana, but it could be anywhere at all, give or take a Jat accent and an overflowing drain or two. His wife Noori ( Pragati) runs a beauty parlour where first time dulhans are enticed into waxing half an arm as a gift to their husbands. And his younger brother Gopal ( Ranjan Chhabra) is a jobless sit-at-home who makes eyes at the mingy grocer's girl, when he does anything at all.

This milieu used to be an integral part of the Hindi movie scene till the 70s and 80s, and then vanished in post-liberalised India, only to surface on and off via those directors who are busy trying to get back` real' India into the movies. 'Saare Jahaan Se Mehenga' mainlines these characters and their constricted lives with compassion and knowledge, and makes it a surprisingly watchable film. The bane of their lives is rising costs, which stops them from having mutton, or `kheer', or `ghee' even once in two years. And, in a nice touch, the reaching out for instant noodles, amidst the gur and ration-waali-shakkar is made a commodity of desire between the young boy and girl: Maggi is 'modern', it is the future.

... contd.

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