Bulbul Pandey ki ajeeb dastan

बुलबुल पांडे की अजीब दास्तान (Bulbul Pandey ki ajeeb dastan) : My quick take on Sony liv’s web series “Kathmandu Connection”.

It seems that Sony liv has found a way to get hold of intriguing content for its OTT platform. I have seen a few like JL50, A Simple Murder, Ram Singh Charlie, Avarodh, Undekhi & Your honor. All these series have my strong recommendation. Now coming to this new web series “Kathmandu Connection”, I would recommend the series for few reasons as follows...

All-new cast – Except for Amit Sial & Zakir Khan, all other performers were new to me, most of them resembled some established star e.g., Aksha Pardasany who has a vital role in the plot looks like Tapsi Pannu but with a straight nose. Aksha is damn beautiful, and she acts well, I wonder why she has is not yet spotted by big banners till now. Anurag Arora looks like Gutthi aka Sunil Grover and the antagonist of the plot Anshuman Pushar who can be taken as poor man’s Vidyut Jamwal.

Plot with a twist – It starts with a typical thriller wherein a cop (played by Dabang Amit Sial) is led to investigate an unknown caller who is stalking a beautiful news reporter. The call is traced to Kathmandu (hence Kathmandu Connection). It is later revealed that the caller is one of the most wanted Don’s who is involved in Mumbai Bomb Blast and the plot becomes a cat n mouse game to nab this most wanted guy. The twist in the tale at the climax is worth appreciating. This reminds me of yesterday CSK vs RCB match, where RCB d a tight grip on the match when CSK was battling, but in the last over Ravindra Jadeja changed the complexion of the game by scoring as many as 39 runs, similarly, this web series meanders for nearly 5 episodes which seem to be a bit of overstretching, but the twist in the episode six is simply mashallah.

Performances – Outstanding performances given by the entire cast, especially Amit Sial he is simply outstanding, and the same can be said about Aksha. However, I felt the antagonist Anshuman is not at all menacing as the role demanded.

The above three reasons are good enough to make you sit through three and half hours and make you binge-watch this season 1 and it will make you overlook lack of consistency in the plot, bit tardy overstretched build-up of each character, lack of finesse in recreating the retro look ( just by giving characters some weird hairdos one cannot recreate the 80’s) and shabby editing ( in my view this could have been more sleekly edited and made into a 2 hr. long movie instead.

Overall, it’s a good time pass to see Amit Sial play a Dabang trigger happy DCP like our Chulbul Pandey sans his छेद wale dialogs.