Jenda Review

"I think life should be more like TV. I think all of life's problems ought to be solved in 30 minutes with simple homilies. I think weight and oral hygiene ought to be our biggest concerns. I think we should all have powerful, high-paying jobs, and everyone should drive fancy sports cars. All our desires should be instantly gratified. Women should always wear tight clothes, and men should carry powerful handguns. Life overall should be more glamorous, thrill-packed, and filled with applause, don't you think?"



The beauty of that statement was a vision. And it is something that most of us lose the capability for at the age of... 6 years? The police aren't saviors who pat brave kids who help nab criminals, they're mostly filthy-mouthed bullies who'd sell their souls for half a biscuit or the next highest bid. The bad guys don't lose their eyes, they define lifestyles. Nobody knows if Dharma protected protects, because Dharma can never be protected - it has extremely powerful enemies, including almost everyone on the front page of the newspapers and most of the rest of the world. God seems to have an insatiable capacity for testing the few good people, and however nice you are, He never gets a spider to bite you the right way.

And somewhere down the line, you learn to accept and to conform. Utopia is getting water for one hour every day, keeping a job, the eve-teasers staying away from your sister and daughter, and all riots happening far away from your home. An ideal world is one which just lets you be.

The dreamer is dead, and what difference does it make, anyway.

To be fair, Jenda is a rotten flick that doesn't deserve a single star. But for about half an hour in between, it makes you feel better than you've felt in a long bloody time, simply because it shows you how things ought to be, in a way that it's almost illegitimate to dream.

The film is about a group of students who capture some dangerous Pakistan-funded terrorists and hand them over to the cops, only to see them escape and realize that it was masterminded by the CM and the entire legislature, who are themselves being funded by Pakistan. They then fight the elections themselves and sweep the polls to form the government.

This is the glorious half-hour. The entire bunch of MLAs, of average age 20, is on bikes on the roads, rampaging corruption, enacting power reforms with éclat, giving jobs absolutely transparently, filling the jails with criminals, eradicating the Naxal movement by co-opting them into governance, publicly blowing the bluff of slothful and crooked bureaucrats, having an extremely ethical and motivated youngster heading the police, and a hell of a lot more stuff you'll never see in your lifetime. It all seems so friggin' simple, and yet so impossible, it makes you want to sit and cry.

The rest of the movie is such unbelievable crap, you can't digest someone like Kodi Ramakrishna made this. Pointing out logical flaws here is like looking for hay in a haystack. And the climax is so downright stupid, you can't bear that they screwed that build-up up so badly. But cribbing about all that and nit-picking into even that half-hour would be to miss an important point. That these people did something even the Almighty doesn't. They dreamt of an ideal world. Achievements are a function of the context, and in a period that bludgeons you into feeling so warm about the CM solving 4 commoners' problems a week in a newspaper, even having a vision like this is breaking the mould.

What difference does it make, you ask? Well, we all have a vision of a God coming to our rescue - what difference does that make?