

And the film's dumbness can be traced most evidently in its central conceit.Ī widower, who is also a casually authoritarian father (Rishi Kapoor as Raj Mathur), creates a fake Facebook profile with the picture of a stunning looking girl, only so that he can open up with his uncommunicative son, Kabir (Anirudh Tanwar). Yes, like the works of those half-artists, Rajma Chawal too is comfortably dumb. Rajma Chawal may be seen as a tribute to those scared Indian artists of two decades back: ones who would frequently threaten to make trips to the high art tradition, their wagons filled with great production values, and who then, would abort the journey midway, and try selling you a packet of toothpaste. There's the problem of progressive ideas being chewed up by middle class sentimentality.Īnd there's naïveté mixed with some genuine moments of beauty. So, while the film rather brilliantly captures the spirit of small-town India, there's also an unbearable amount of moral simplification here. Rajma Chawal comes with many of the virtues of the Indian pop art of that period (the Piyush Pandey advertisements to go with the music videos) and, justly perhaps, with many of the same bad habits.
