Katha

I noticed that one of the movies I had in my saved list on Tubi is about to expire at the end of December, so I had to watch it now and juggle my posts around to be able to put up a post on it now. That movie is an early-1980s movie from India called Katha.

The movie opens with a grandmother telling her grandson a bedtime story, Aesop's fable about the Tortoise and the Hare, and the movie cuts to an animated version of that old fable. Except that as Grandma says, this is going to be a more modern version. As we all know in the original, the hare is so arrogant that he thinks he can take a long nap and still win, while the slow and steady tortoise walks right past the sleeping hare. In this animated version, however, the hare climbs up on the tortoise's shell, jumping right off just before the finish line to run ahead. The kid says that's not how the story goes, but grandma knows real life isn't always a fable....

Cut to a chawl, a sort of lower-middle-class apartment block like those old US motels where every room had a front door facing the outside and you climb outside stairs if you don't live on th ground floor, in Bombay. Rajaram Joshi (Naseeruddin Shah) is a clerk for a shoe manufacturer Footprint Shoes trying to get ahead in life, but he's such a timid guy that he's never gotten that far. In fact, he thinks that if he can get his next promotion, he's going to be set for life in a cushy job. He loves Sandhya (Deepti Naval), who lives in another residence in the chawl with her parents, but he's never been able to let the family know about his feelings so they can think about arranging a marriage. Clearly he's the tortoise here.

And then the hare shows up, in the form of Rajaram's old acquaintance Vasudev (Farook Shaikh), who is now calling himself Bashu which, as I understand it not speaking Hindi, is another form of the same name. Bashu has been god only knows where, but he quickly makes himself a fixtur in Rajaram's life, to the point that poor put-upon Rajaram and the rest of us can't help but think of Bashu as a dishonest smooth operator at best and a mooch at worst. Bashu tells Rajaram stories about his past jobs that clearly seem exaggerated, while saying that jobs just fall from heaven. And for Bashu, they really do.

Bashu goes stalking a couple of rich guys playing golf, and at the 19th hole tries to pass himself off as a golf expert. One of the guys is businessman Mr. Dhindhoria, there with second wife Anuradha and daughter from a first marriage Jojo. Bashu charms them so much that Mr. Dhindhoria gives him a job and invites him to the best parties, while Bashu also starts flirting with Jojo.

It turns out that Mr. Dhindoria's company is... Footprint Shoes. Worse for Rajaram is that he stays late to do extra work to try to get ahead, only for Bashu to try to pass that work off as his own. And then Sandhya's parents come over to Rajaram's rooms to talk about marriage... only for Rajaram to learn they want to arrange Sandhya's marriage to Bashu.

Katha turned out to be an interesting movie, one that in some ways plays on universal themes, but one that in other ways is either very much Indian or at least very much not Hollywood. There are four or five Bollywood-style musical numbers, along with a presentation of Indian business culture that's much more predicated on the idea of everybody being out for himself than even in American business culture. At least here in the US getting ahead in life isn't really done with the idea that if you're not cheating, you're not trying, certainly not to the extent it's portrayed as being done in this movie.

I mostly enjoyed Katha, although I do have to point out the print Tubi has runs almost 137 minutes, which I felt was a bit long for a fairly simple story. The print was also not subtitled by default the way the foreign films TCM shows are, but on my Roku box when I turned on captioning, I got English-language subtitles. So give Katha a try before it leaves Tubi in a few days.