Khosla Ka Ghosla

Khosla Ka Ghosla is a small film, small in its budget, in terms of its cast and crew and its canvas. But the utterly discreet and unassuming film aims at something big: it tries to bring back the clean and simple story-telling of Sai Paranjape and Hrishikesh Mukherjee.

The hero is a middleclass Punjabi, K.K. Khosla (Kher), who invests his life’s savings on a plot of land which is taken over by the land shark Kishan Khurana (Irani). It’s all about how the Khosla family gets together to reclaim the land from right under Khurana’s nose. The story is actually built around a trifle, a slim, thin idea. The climax might seem a bit too far-fetched to some, a bit laidback and lacking in the dramatic punches that we all are so used to seeing in 70 mm. But the writing succeeds in bringing alive the bunch of oddball characters. Each of them is extremely well-observed and uniformally good acting (specially from Kher, Irani and Shorey) only adds to their appeal. The characters are also very well-placed in their environment. Their quaint quirks, their commonplace lingo brings alive Delhi’s Punjabiyat and the many Punjabi families where sons are called ‘Bunty’ and ‘Cherry’, where parents dream of building multi-storey houses, a floor each for the sons’ families, where they eat rajma in the night and wake up next morning complaining of flatulence, where they worship ‘mata rani’ Vaishnodevi.

These banalities of middle-class Delhi life are the best thing. The green, peeling walls and the cheap, gold nameplate of the house, the batik nighties of the mother, the father waking up the entire family with his loud gargles, his uncomfortable booze session with the sons and that ultimate dream of building a house in South Delhi, ordering food from Nirula’s and having pizza with chutney. Don’t go looking for a rip-roaring, boisterous comedy. Just some sweet smiles and quiet giggles. A word about the music. There are some nice, quirky songs but they don’t seem to grow out of the narrative, seems more as if they are thrust in to fill in as the background score. And pray, why was the print so dull and faded? Made the film appear dated when it is not.

High Fives

Bollywood
1. Lage Raho Munnabhai
2. Pyaar Ke Side Effects
3. Naksha
4. Shiva
5. KANK

Hollywood
1. Gridiron Gang
2. The Black Dahlia
3. Everyone’s Hero
4. The Covenant
5. The Last Kiss

Rock
1. Modern Times (Bob Dylan)
2. Undiscovered (James Morrison)
3. Black Holes and Revelations (Muse)
4. The Open Door (Evanescence)
5. Free-Forever Free (Free)

Courtesy: Film Information