Bambai Meri Jaan Review: Kay Kay Menon & Avinash Tiwary shine in a gangster drama

Language: Hindi

Cast: Avinash Tiwary, Kay Kay Menon, Kritika Kamra, Jitin Gulati, Saurabh Sachdeva, Nivedita Bhattacharya, Vivan Bhatena and Aditya Rawal

Director: Shujaat Saudagar

Bambai Meri Jaan shows how a righteous police officer, Ismail Qadri (Kay Kay Menon) gets trapped with four children in Bombay during the mid-sixties. He sends his second son, the brightest among his kids to an English medium school because a soothsayer once told him that this particular kid is going to do something big in life. But unfortunately the big, turns out to be something different in the future. Menon senses his son’s aspirations were high and so was his desires, but little did he know that the means that he will adopt is going to be immoral.

The show is set against the backdrop of the world of 1960’s Bombay, the underworld rising through the ranks, and gang wars and rivalries. Bambai Meri Jaan has taken inspiration from the book written by former investigative journalist Hussain Zaidi Hussain Zaidi’s Dongri To Dubai. Bambai Meri Jaan traces the evolution of the present day organised crime by a mafia gang common in the city of dreams Bombay who in their initial years were smugglers and muggers. How the gangs are built up and how the gang war starts with the different shades of family life with  proper back stories, is what the show can boast of. Each character has depth. Kritika Kamra as Habiba also has an important role to play. The transition of her character too cannot be ignored. That is the best part of series or rather the digital platform, everybody has an important role to play.  The makers of Bambai Meri Jaan recreated the city’s landscape from the post-independence era.

The place where Bambai Meri Jaan fails is the over-stretch which to some extent gets boring and takes out the fun of watching a series. 10 episodes with a run time of 50 minutes each gets a little too tedious for the viewers. But the good thing about the show is that it creates characters who are perfectly grey which is close to reality.   Getting back to the making of the uncrowned king of Bombay Underworld, the show talks about the making of this man from rags to riches.

The show very intelligently focuses on the grey characters and subtly makes a statement that no matter how much we hail a gangster; he is clearly at fault. Never once does the father, Ismail Qadri (Kay Kay Menon) hail the wrong doings of his son Dara (Avinash Tiwary). The show never tries to hail Dara just because he belongs to the have-nots. The strange thing is how greed hits home too. The mother knows everything, but is in a state of denial and very clearly she was so busy with the household chores that she fails to give the right upbringing to her children. She too is a perfect grey character trapped in poverty, she too can’t keep her hands on the luxuries of life.

Building up the character of Dara (Avinash Tiwary) and his journey is gripping. The transition that he goes through is interesting. Kay Kay Menon known to be a craftsman who never compromises on his craft, the character and the pain of Ismail Qadri is real through all his expressions. A man of few words, his eyes do all the talking in the show and shows pain that he is going through. He is the real gold in the show.

But Bambai Meri Jaan lacked freshness. It was like any other gangster drama trying to show the fight between the haves and the have nots. Haven’t we seen enough of these crime thrillers before?

Rating: 3 out of 5

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