Do Dooni Chaar

In a season of overblown action-comedies with superstars laying down the ground-rules for dynamic dada-giri on the large screen, it is refreshing and comforting to see an aging world-weary working-class hero who travels to work on a rickety scooter and tries to fulfil his nucleur family’s dreams of a car.

The journey from the two-wheeler to the four is what Do Dooni Chaar is about.

It’s a simple premise peppered and punctuated by scenes and dialogues straight out of a Punjabi middleclass household in Delhi where the two grownup kids dream of BMWs and IPL shares while the father tries to put together money for an Alto and chicken meals for his family.

The film directed by debutant Habib Faizal, has a heartwarming slice-of-life feel to it. Rishi Kapoor, playing a working-class loser for the first time in his career (Shah Rukh in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi 20 years later) pitches in a near-flawless performance as a maths teacher whose students have gone on to own the best cars in the world while he, the gyan guru, remains frozen in his middleclass karma.

Mercifully the neatly scripted (but at times a little under-done) film opts not to focus on the irony of a knowledge-giver’s financial burdens.

Instead the plot cleverly digs out situations where the Duggal family is shown getting into comic crises, such as the wedding at Rishi’s sister’s in-laws’ place where the Duggal parivar has to show up in a borrowed car. These situations written sensibly and enacted convincingly echo the savagery of life for the workingclass without wasting time feeling sorry for the characters.

Not just Rishi’s Kapoor’s character…Even his wife played by the lovely Neetu Singh comes across as unfussy practical clever and sensible householder who makes ends meet not by the size of her husband’s income but by a miraculous mix of common sense and uncommon guts.

It’s a pleasure beyond measure to watch Rishi and Neetu play their real-life roles on screen. For those of us who watched the pair do Khullam khulla pyar in their heydays watching them slip effortlessly into the roles of harried parents seems like a journey well taken.

Add the two teenage actors playing Rishi-Neetu’s son (Archit Krishna) and daughter (Aruna Vasudev) into the plot.

And we are face-to-face with as real a family as it can get in a quirky whimsical earthy and heartwarming saga of a working class family’s promotion in life from the scooter to the automobile.

The script sometimes careens towards a scathing comment on the road taken by the underpaid teaching fraternity country. Blessedly Rishi Kapoor, one of the finest and most underrated actors of our country, plays Santosh Duggal as a bit of a rogue, not averse to shortcuts when the going gets really tough.

The humanization and under-idealization of the knowledge-giver is a clever touch in the script. The debutant director demonstrates substantial scripting skills in the way he leads his protagonist up the road of corruption and then pulls him back from temptation just in time.

On a level that goes beyond entertainment Do Dooni Chaar is actually a timely warning to the architects of the country’s education system.

The film says…don’t let the guru become a shishya of compromised idealism. Pay the teacher well. On the other hand if such a reform in the educationalist’s lives really happened we wouldn’t have the pleasure of seeing Rishi Kapoor deliver such a lived-in bravura performance.

Go for Do Dooni Chaar. Its title says it all, suggesting not only that the protagonist is a mathematician but also that he is constantly trying to count the ways to make his family’s life comfortable.

Here, it all adds up.