Nahin Chala
Ujjwal Singh had an idea. He must have read in the papers or seen it on TV about parental pressure on children to act and excel according to their parents' dreams and fancies. However, he could not put together a good cohesive script and in the result spoilt his own chances. In order to prove his point, he goes overboard and tries to go to an extreme, from where there is no return...at least no return to reality.
Navneet studies in Class XI in St. Joseph's school, Allahabad and is like any kid of his generation, bright, intelligent and playful...yet when his parents, played by Kanwaljeet and Rati Agnihotri force him to take up engineering which promises a secure, bright future according to them instead of literature, he can't handle the pressue and succumbs to the situation by taking his own life. He jumps from the terrace of his school building. His friends in the group could not take his loss and are suddenly alarmed by this growing menace in the society and decide to start a movement against parents and the government, before more young people sacrifice their lives. All this was fine, till the director goes overboard in the crusade. Some cases are shown to highlight parent atrocities on children like parents snatching away canvas from children or forcefully stopping their children from writing, so that they can concentrate on science subjects. Well, these things do happen, but can't be generalised to happen to all students all the time and all parents acting similarly with no mercy for their young ones.
Lawyer Uncle Sanjay played by Mithun Chakraborty takes up the responsibility to fight the case for the students against almost everyone else. And the whole legal angle turns it into a boring and monotonous drama and the movie almost completely loses its plot in the second half. Students who are yet to pass out of school will get demoralized
There could have been a good movie made out of this relevant topic, especially when our new Minister is trying to detraumatise education and taking steps to ease the pressure off children, but the lure of sermonizing to the society was bit too much to avoid for our Director.
The songs were OK and some of them were just to provide relief from the heavy duty stuff going on in real life from the students. In terms of acting, Shilpa Shukla and Mukesh Khana did a decent job. Unfortunately due to the extreme position taken by the director, the movie will not inspire the students much. I think, today's kids are much more balanced and they know how to handle pressure and follow their dreams. Parent, I would say many of them have also become more understanding and hard to believe, they could take such a confronting position in the court without showing much sensitivity. Also, students in Class XI are focused on building their career and not on taking up social causes. The movie seems bit outdated in terms of style and approach to societal issues.
Avoid, if possible and this home-school-courtroom drama is definitely not a family film for parents and children to watch together.