Jamtara Review : Mostly sunny, slightly rocky

Jharkand calls out lustily in the show, Jamtara which is the story of Sunny Mondal  (Sparsh Shrivastav), bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but on the wicked path of phishing. The shot-through-a-sepia-gauze cinematography sets the perfect stage for this show that is based on a true story in an actual village called Jamtara. The series is written by Trishant Srivastava and directed by Soumendra Padhi who won the National Award for Best Children’s Film for Budhia Singh: Born to Run in 2016.

Sunny and his friends make calls to unsuspecting folks asking for their bank card details and promptly skim money from their accounts. Well, since they are underage to have their own accounts, they bribe a host of  ‘pretend’ chachas and mamas to open accounts for them. Sunny, who aces mimicking a girl’s voice, goes by the name, Swati in his tele-calling avatar. He’s the best of the lot. That causes significant angst for his cousin, Rocky, (Anshumaan Pushkar) who is a pawn in the hands of local Bahubali, Brajesh Bhan (Amit Sial).

Enter Gudiya (Monika Panwar), the gritty girl with sights set on emigrating to Canada. Her call-center training on how to excel at phishing is fabulous, created with confident strokes of authenticity. Sunny falls in love with her, marries her, though not for the same reasons as she marries him. To add a complication, she sparks an itch in the loins for Bhan. And, that’s when the action starts: Bhan’s desperation to covet Dolly and Sunny (for different reasons, of course).

I waited for the Superintendent of Police, Dolly, (Aksha Pardasany), to make a plot-defining move, but all the moves she ends up making are bumbling/bungling ones. Her cyber-crime partner, who looks like the poor man’s Abhishek Bachchan, dumbs down basics around tracing calls to a level that even my granny would scoff at. In addition to being a cyber-crime specialist, he’s a klutz who helps build the plot by dropping things. Equally disappointing is the Maharabharat angle in which most of the analogies drawn look forced to me.

Sial is mind-blowing in his performance, his rendition of lesser-known old filmy songs sung to menacing tones, his swag, his tawdry mannerisms: one can’t take eyes off the screen when he appears. The rustic earnestness and chemistry between the juvenile criminals is also endearing.

For Season II, I’d like them to stay away from making it too Mirzapur-ish and focus on the delicate socio-psychological fabric that has given Jamtara this notoriety: why phishing is more than that the just technology that aids its, and the lack of it that befuddles the police.

Final thoughts – Let’s try to avoid The Danger of a Single Story, as narrated so well by Chimamanda Adichie in this TedTalk.

Punjabis being about ladies sangeets and weddings, Gujratis being about loud dressing and thrift, and more recently, UP-waalas/Biharis being about bahubalis and gang-wars. Come on, content creaters, we can do better than that!

Sunny and Dolly watching their ‘call-center’ burn down.