Omprakash Zindabad

Voot Select

*ing: Om Puri, Jagdeep, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Zakir Hussain

Rated: 5.5/10

It is not very often that we see movies that make us sit up and think long after the credits have stopped rolling. Omprakash Zindabad directed by Ranjeet Gupta may not be your average film that has masala or an item number. But it does have a hard hitting message to deliver. A message how the common man with small dreams gets taken in by the outwardly materialistic world and falls for it hook, line and sinker with no means for a reprieve.

The story is straight forward. A village man thinks that getting a bike will get him the leg up in life. For this he is willing to put his wife up for the worst kind of crime that can be done against a woman — to be gang-raped and paraded naked in the village — so that he can get the compensation that the Government gives to such survivors. All for the sake of a bike and become the town’s hero.

This satirical take on the situation and how the system is manipulated by those in power has its moments that makes one laugh at the greed and the lengths they would go to for money and the next, it leaves one with a feeling of disgust and sadness that people would rape, a heinous crime, for their own personal gains and scam the poor in the name of the Government compensation.

This is Om Puri and Jagdeep’s last movie. It is unfortunate that this film was released four years after the former’s death. But it was good to see Jagdeep, who died in July 2020, and that he had not lost the spark in his eyes even though he was 81. One just wished that Gupta could have better utilised their talent. The same goes for Kulbhushan Kharbanda whose talent is wasted here.