Kill, 2023, Movie Review

The truth is that there aren't enough good action movies in the world, and even less so in Bollywood, that has always anchored its centre of gravity in romance, drama, comedy and patriotism as its chief genres. And that’s why, once in a while, when a kick-ass action film comes our way, we lap it up like a hungry dog that’s not been fed its favourite meat for days. Kill, directed by the talented writer-director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, now streaming on Disney+Hotstar, is all this and much more. 

The plot is simple. A train from Ranchi to Delhi, gets overtaken by local dacoits with a plan to loot the passengers. Their simple plan goes fast goes out of control when the protagonist, Capt Amrit Rathod and his friend Viresh (both from the NSG), fight back, both to resist the dacoitry as well as to protect Rathod’s girlfriend and her family, who are also traveling in the same train. What ensues is a brutal kill-a-thon as the bad guys start killing vulnerable people in the train including people dear to Rathod, and Rathod returning the compliment 10 times more violent, till the very end.

Simply put the film is “bloody” fantastic. It’s bloody AND it’s fantastic. The action sequences, almost entirely without guns, deliver the adrenaline pumping rush that one desires from an action film. The fights are heart thumping. The killing is violent. The good people dying is heart-breaking. And the vengeance is sweet and intense. Just what we want from a great violent kill-fest, like Kill Bill, or John Wick.

Lakshya, the new actor, as Capt Amrit Rathod, is an absolute joy to watch. As he goes about wrecking hell on the bad guys, single-handedly destroying the entire clan of bandits, we can’t help but cheer and join the crowd that wants each and every of these merciless dacoits to not only die but to suffer in extreme agony before they do. As the trained NSG commando, Lakshya is both believable and impactful. The sheer intensity of his rage and the control of his body language as he lands the punches, is what makes this movie. Raghav Juyal, popularly known as Crockroaxz, from many dance-reality TV shows, is absolutely brilliant as the main bad guy, who we want desperately to get tortured and murdered. The supporting cast do a great job as well to serve as the background against which to enjoy the meaningfulness of the action, with Tanya Maniktala, as Tulika, Rathod’s girlfriend, Ashish Vidyarthi, as the paternal leader of the dacoits pack, and Abhishek Chauhan, as Viresh, Rathod’s best friend.

Even as we relish every head getting smashed, every neck getting sliced, every chest getting pierced, and even a face getting set on fire, we cant help wonder and even feel shocked at our own anger and at the deep-seated violence within us, that is making us enjoy this blood and gore. While at one level it connects us with one of our basest animal instinct of fight (over flight), at another level it gives us a moment of release amidst our bottled-up privileged city lives. And that’s why it’s no wonder that it’s a Karan Johar production. It is meant for us, city-dwellers, living far away from the reality of dacoits and hinterland, far enough to enjoy it as entertainment and not reality. It’s also mildly disturbing to think that in an extremely unequal society of ours, this film celebrates the violence that a relatively upper income side of society (Rathod and his rich and politically connected girlfriend’s family) inflicts on the poorer section of society (the dacoits from Bihar). Yes, the bad guys deserve what they get. But, one can’t help wonder the subtle positioning of who’ s good and who’ s bad. Should we be worried of an emerging trend or narrative of the rich feeling like victims?

Nevertheless, the one hour forty-five minutes on this train to Delhi is literally a ride that is worth every minute. A non-stop no-breather full on power packed experience that we haven’t had in a very long time. Kill, is one of the finest that modern Bollywood can offer and a shot in the arm for an other wise lack-lustre identity crisis that the industry is having. I really hope there is a sequence to Kill (like John Wick and Kill Bill) where the fights get bigger, better, bolder. More power to you Nikhil Nagesh Bhat. 

Why I Got Over Coldplay, January 2025

I was in my first purchased (rather EMI) car after having just started to work, waiting for my then-girlfriend to arrive, before heading out on a date. In those heady days of an early romance, filled with both excitement and insecurities, I remember vividly experiencing the magic of the music that the new-band-on-the-block had created, speaking to my inner battle of love vs loneliness. The year was 2000, the song was Shiver, the album was Parachutes, the band was Coldplay.

This first album was an absolute master-stroke, with their biggest hit, Yellow, that became the most popular entry into what was to become, the phenomenon of Coldplay. As we heard one song after another, we felt it tugging at a side of our hearts that we hadn’t paid attention to all these years. It was a definingly new sound, that gave us a beautiful bittersweet feeling of emptiness, a yearning for love, a nagging of an unfulfilled desire, a state of a life-in-crisis, being one step away from falling back into being alone. BUT equally the music also gave us the feeling of a foolish young optimism, the sting of romance that we scratch again and again, the pleasure and the pain of an unrequited love, and the dream-like assurance of a happy ending that’s just around the corner. 

Here was an artist that got it, what love and life in the new millennium felt like for a young person. And like many others at the time, I was hooked. #Coldplay-for-life.

And yet, 25 years later, even as Coldplay has become the biggest music sensation in the world right now, and against the background of the band finally touring India to overwhelmingly successful concerts, with millions of die-hard fans, I feel the almost-sacrilegious feeling that “I’m over Coldplay, actually”.

As I came to this sudden realisation, when I didn’t bother waiting in online queues for tickets and paying ridiculous prices for scarce ones, I surprised myself and started wondering when and how did this happen. I thought I LOVED Coldplay, how could i get over it.

When I now look back at this 25 year relationship with Coldplay, it seems to have happened slowly over a period of time, a little bit like a long marriage, where the couple, without knowing and wanting it, grow apart and stop being for each other what each of them need or want. Don’t get me wrong. I will still enjoy a drink with a Coldplay song, will groove to it whenever it plays in a bar, sing along when it comes up in a party, and hum the tune once in a while in the shower. But it doesn’t have the same place as it did in my heart till a few years ago.

As Coldplay put out the second album, A Rush of Blood to the Head in 2002, their winning music continued to hit the spot. I realised why their music was so addictive. It was the “magic of melancholy music”. The band knew what we feel like when we are alone, and when no one is watching. They could speak to us deep down. Their music didn’t just get our minds and feet moving, but they got our soul to echo back to their sounds. Don’t Panic, Shiver, Sparks, Parachutes, We Never Change, Everything’s not Lost from their first album. In My Place, The Scientist, Clocks, Warning Sign, Amsterdam from the second album. Fix You from their third (X&Y, 2005). They all hit that melancholy spot in our hearts, perfectly.

But as they became bigger and more popular, their music moved from what they were imagining to possibly what people wanted to hear more of. There became a very subtle and gradual shift from the complex emotion of melancholy to a more uni-dimensional emotion of celebration. The turn of the decade and perhaps a post recession world, saw this change starting from their 5th 2011 Album Mylo Xyloto, with their superhit Paradise. As they tasted mass success, this shift towards a more pop exploration of love continued. The album Ghost Stories, 2014, gave us Magic and Sky Full of Stars. If I were to pin point the time when this transformation was complete, I would say 2015, with the album A Head Full of Dreams. With songs like Hymn for the Weekend, Adventure of a Lifetime, Coldplay was no longer being described by the album covers and music journals as ‘alternative’. Coldplay was a full blown pop sensation, and everybody loved them. Post COVID, with many collab songs like My Universe with BTS, Something Just like This with Chainsmokers, and solos like Higher Power,  the band just took off to become one of the most popular band of the current generation, who could do no wrong.

It’s not that the music they have created in the last few years is not good. It’s just that it’s not what the promise of their music is. Melancholy and Celebration are fundamentally opposite paradigms. One is an introverted emotion, the other a social experience. One is to soak your soul into, the other is to move your body to. One is about how I feel, the other is about what I’m doing. And with so much Celebration music in our lives anyway, the unique space that Coldplay had to fill the melancholy void of our lives, is unfortunately gone forever. And, as the music of the soul transformed into the dance of the many, I can’t help feeling a sense of betrayal at the original contract we had with the band and their music. The contract that said ‘You get me, you see me, and that’s enough’.

And now, 25 years later, even as I move to the Coldplay music along with a large group of friends, with a drink in my hand, I find myself reaching out once again for their first album.. enjoying momentarily the idea of how far we’ve come and yet lamenting at how much we’ve lost.. 

A Year in Books, 2024

 So much to read.. and so little time.. 

January - The Bullet That Missed, Richard Osman - As per tradition, started the year with a murder mystery, to fight the post holiday blues. Third in the Thursday Murder Club series, where the murders get more brutal, the septuagenarian main characters we love get bolder, the plots get more intricate, and yet the overall joy and impact gets weaker. After the deeply enjoyable first one, these next two have been a little meh, falling between neither being a page-turning crime thriller nor being a warm affectionate look at retired-but-super-active British sleuths.

April - Bad Luck and Trouble, Lee Child - The eleventh book in the super successful Jack Reacher series, ahead of watching Season 2 on prime video, based on this novel. What appeals is the raw avenging very old-school masculine character that wants to make his personal world right and make the bad guys pay. But this story misses the mark by a mile. With an intention to bring back characters and connection to his hitherto unexplored past life, to tell an action packed story in the present, the plot fails to deliver the intrigue, the action, the adrenaline and the pleasure of pop fiction that we expect from a Jack Reacher novel.

May - Modi and India, 2024 and the Battle for Bharat, Rahul Shivshankar, Siddhartha Talya - Appropriate timing, reading this during the elections in the largest democracy in the world, with a deliberate intent of an intellectual experiment to read a right-of-centre narrative (how right you ask!) to see the other side. The book makes a compelling case that by painting the right as only wrong, we miss the opportunity to have a more balanced perspective in Indian politics. But not as compelling as the final results we saw the Indian voter deliver, which only reinforced all our collective faith in the power and the relevance of democracy in an increasingly un-democratic world.

July - The Shining, Stephen King - Finally got around to reading this iconic thriller from the master story teller, and even after all the hype and high expectations, the book delivers and hits the spot, and how. King is a master at crafting characters with deep emotional complexity that manifests in the spooky events which unfold in the storyline. A child with psychic energy (aka ‘the shining’), a recovering alcoholic borderline-abusive father, a mother with a troubled childhood, all trapped in a haunted hotel with decades of sinister history. What more do you need to tell one of the best scary stories ever written.

August - The Book of Compassion, Pooja Pande - “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of”, crooned Dionne Warwick. This book, as I proudly say written by my sister, is both timely, as a reminder to each one of us amidst a feeling of losing our way in the world; as well as timeless, in that the very foundation of humanity is the spirit of compassion. The genius of the book is in the simple definition of compassion being ‘empathy in action’ which is all we need to not only live our own lives in a fulfiling way but also to transform the world we live in. 

August - Before the Cofffee Gets Cold, Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated Geoffrey Trousselot - A year in books is not complete without a Japanese novel. And this one hit the spot for that unique Japanese storytelling fix that we need from time to time. True to style, the characters are nuanced, the story telling is slow and immersive, and a lot more happens inside the minds and hearts of the characters than in the actual story. Only a Japanese author can tell the story of time travelling where you don’t even leave the chair you’re sitting on in a coffee shop! 

October - And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie, Audiobook/Audible - The book I listened to, to satisfy a craving for Agatha Christie. One of my all time favourites, and hadn’t read in a while, decided to listen to this one after all these years. While the narrator was not as impactful as he could’ve been, the story is so powerful, that once again it left me with awe at the brilliance of this writer, still the queen of crime novels. No one comes close. Ten unsuspecting strangers trapped on an island, being murdered one by one, till there are none. Masterpiece!

October - Mythos, Stephen Fry, Audiobook/Audible - Continuing the audiobook streak, having read this book 5 years ago, wanted to “re-read” this one. Narrated by the inimitable Fry himself, in his characteristic British style, listening to this one is a sheer delight. Telling the stories of the Greek Mythology from the very beginning, against a broad timeline, this book is the most authoritative and entertaining compendium to understand the very human Gods of this culture, that have had such a wide ranging impact on the stories and the imagination in the whole world.

November - The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, Joseph Stiglitiz - The book I’ve been waiting to be written finally showed itself in this highly relevant, deeply insightful and superbly provocative text by the Nobel Laureate. Clearly explaining why neo-liberalist capitalism, which has been the dominant economic theory and model across countries for the last 40 odd years, has not delivered and created a highly unequal, unsustainable society we live in today. Arguing that the role of economics is to create a good society, the book makes the case of what the author calls ‘progressive capitalism’ that balances the freedom of a few with the freedom of the many, with a greater and a more specific role for the Government and public institutions.

December - An Eye for an Eye, Jeffrey Archer - Perhaps reading Jeffrey Archer for the first time after college, when he was a rage. Revisitng him (and probably his ghost writers), I decided to revisit this author from our youth, who still seems to be going on. A thriller that spans contemporary politics and business deals, it’s an easy, time-pass, no-gain-no-loss reading that is perhaps a half-decent substitute for watching an in flight movie on a long distance flight. Indeed that’s what it served as, for me.

December - Almond, Sohn Won-Pyung, translated by Joosun Lee - Been meaning to read a Korean author, and this became my first. Growing up story of a boy named Yunjae, born with Alexithymia, that doesn’t allow him to feel any emotions like love, fear, anger. After losing his family to a violent crime, it’s the story of his coming of age, building relationships, and finding his way in a world full of emotions that he is unable to access. A poignant and warmly told story that contrasts the boy who cannot feel any emotion (and is yet so deeply human), with the rest of the world that can feel all the emotions, and is yet so deeply inhuman. An easy read, and a good cozy way to end the year.

While I missed my 12 books goal this year, here’s to another year of books and reading. 

Happy New Year 2025. 

Happy Reading.