‘Rangbaaz Phirse’: A welcome encounter 

Bullet-ridden biographic sketches of hardcore criminals in North Indian exploring the genesis of their outlawry…that seems to be the brief for the Rangbaaz series which is now on to Season 2. Bring on the bullets and bloodshed.

Much of it may seem like a repeat of Season 1.Promising  academically- inclined youngster from the cow belt turns to a life of crime supported by local politicians….In  Rangbaaz the well-played role of the outlawed Shiv Prakash Shukla(Saqib Salim) was sturdily supported by two powerful politician-criminals played by Tigmanshu Dhulia and Ravi Kissan.

The  political mafia in Rangbaaz Phirse comes across weak flabby and flat. But on the other hand, this time we get Jimmy Sheirgil as the protagonist whose dreams of becoming a civil servant are smothered by an uncivil life of criminality. Sheirgil is an actor who can breathe life into the ‘deadest’ of roles.  Writer Siddharth Mishra provides plenty of raw meat for Jimmy to chew on. He gets to play the entire spectrum from ruthless(with his adversaries) to tender(with his wife and daughter).

Jimmy’s stolen moments with his screen wife(Spruha Joshi,  quiet understated mollifying) are special. They also have the unfortunate side effect of over-humanizing the criminal-hero, showing him to be a routine family man forced into a life of crime by corrupt politicians and a system of governance that favours the rich and powerful. So basically all that killing and looting is our fault.

As a morally conflicted cop, Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub has a  more complex part to play. The uncomfortable truth about  ‘encounter’ killings and how senior cops are bullied by politicians into subverting the law are also brought up in the series. But nothing overly probing. We can say,  the investigation of the politician-cop-criminal nexus in the series is as skin-deep as the investigations that happen every time there is an alleged encounter killing in a godforsaken part of our beloved country.

And yet for all its sins of skimpiness  Rangbaaz Phirse keeps the interest-level alive even as  most of  the cast drops dead.While Sheirgil confers a  kind of distant tragic  dignity  to his  outcaste’s role, the supporting cast specially Mohammad Zeeshan, Sushant Singh and Sharad Kelkar provide  solid support with their  habitual  propensity to go beyond  the written word.

Zeeshan’s cop character provides an  alternative  voiceover to Jimmy’s anti-hero’s commentary. Dare  we suggest  that this merger of voices  from both sides  of the law is meant to show how closely crime and  the law are connected in our country?

Clearly  the script favours shortcuts, The  Jat versus Rajput caste politics in Rajasthan is played out at a low ebb. The crux of the sprawling saga is to create a splashy gangster drama. And that is not such a  bad thing.