(For SI Blog commenter Hari)

To all the schmucks who cry out loud that Indians just don’t have it in them to make good movies, we ask, have you putzheads watched Khosla Ka Ghosla.

Have you?

Speak up, bozos.

Khosla Ka Ghosla – Delightful Comedy

Helmed by a competent director (Dibakar Banerjee), supported by a fine cast of actors (Anupam Kher, Ranvir Shorey, Vinay Pathak, Boman Irani, Navin Nischol, Tara Sharma, Parvin Dabas, Nitesh Pandey) and solidly scripted by a talented writer (Jaideep Sahni), Khosla Ka Ghosla is an excellent entertainer.

It’s been a long time since a Hindi film gave us so much pleasure.

After watching this fine movie the other day (at the repeated urging of a SI commenter), we greatly regretted not seeing it earlier.

Well, as the cliche goes, better late than never.

As anyone of Indian origin can tell you, middle-class folks from that benighted land have three grand ambitions in life – Ensure their son turns out an engineer or doctor, get their daughter married to an engineer or doctor and build a house before retiring from their job.

Each goal is a herculean endeavor and few middle class Indians manage to pull off all three tasks successfully.

Khosla Ka Ghosla centers around the efforts of a middle-class Delhi native on the threshold of retirement to accomplish the third goal – buying a plot, the first step toward building a house.

Buy buying a plot and building a house is easier said than done in Mera Bharat Mahaan.

And that’s where our ‘uncle’ Kamal Kishore Khosla (Anupam Kher) gets trapped in the quicksands of corruption that bedevils the land.

No sooner does our middle-class ‘uncle’ Khosla purchase a plot for Rs 30 lakh than he finds it’s been encroached upon by a scheming rogue Khurana (Boman Irani) who demands Rs 15 lakh to vacate the property.

Khosla’s best efforts to get the land back the right way via the police, lawyers and social activists yield no results as each group is interested only in making money off his plight.

Every plan, including the hiring of some wrestlers, goes awry and, nay, makes things even worse.

Khosla gets depressed. So much so that’s he’s ready to throw in the towel and forget about the damn house!

Moved by his father’s plight, Khosla’s younger son Chironji Lal Khosla aka Cherry stirs into action. A software engineer, Cherry is a bit  alienated from his family and has been quietly planning to move to America.

Cherry now teams up with an employment agent Asif Iqbal (Vinay Pathak) and a bunch of others to beat the scheming Khurana at his own game through a novel trick.

Well, the tactics Cherry deploys to con Khurana are not very convincing but, hey, they do pack some hilarious moments.

Many Delights

Every single member of the cast delivers a superb performance, the movie is littered with humorous moments and there’s even a sweet romance between a beautiful stage actress Meghna (Tara Sharma) and Chironji.

It was a pleasure to see the late Navin Nischol light up the screen. We hadn’t seen him on screen in a long time.

Say what you will but the older generation of Bollywood actors were far better than the troupe of monkeys (Abhishek Bachchan, Salman Khan, Akshay Kumar etc) who are prancing and preening these days. The old guard could at least act.

Of course, Khosla Ka Ghosla is not without faults.

It’s hard to believe that a big-time swindler Khurana, wise in the ways of cheating so many people off their land, falls a prey to the tactics of Khosla’s family members.

But even the best of movies requires some suspension of disbelief. Right, na?

We weren’t surprised one bit to learn that Khosla Ka Ghosla won the Best Hindi Picture award in 2006. It most definitely deserved the honor.

Khosla Ka Ghosla proves that you don’t need the props of stars like Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, Hrithik Roshan or Akshay Kumar to make an entertaining Hindi movie.

Strongly Recommended

SearchIndia.com heartily recommends Khosla Ka Ghosla.

We’re sure you’ll enjoy this one as much as we did.

In the U,S., Khosla Ka Ghosla is available on Netflix Instant Play with English subtitles.

  Khosla Ka Ghosla Review