‘Panga’ is so heartwarming, it will melt all your cynicism

Just when  you thought you have had enough of these  mofussil mellow dramas , you know those slowburn rom-coms and familiar family tales with characters  that you’ve met when  you  last visited  Bhopal, Rai Bareilly, Kanpur or Patna, just when you thought this was the director Ashiwiny Iyer  Tiwari’s  Bhopal Ki Barfi,  along comes  Panga, a  film so inured in the   magic of  middleclass resilience that  by the end, when Jaya Nigam scores  that ultimate goal in the  international Kabaddi match, I was rooting not just for India, but for the Indian housewife whose dreams are thwarted  by the bump and grind of daily existence.

So where do I begin to tell you about the enriching experience of watching Ashwini Iyer Tiwari’s Panga? Let me start in the middle. It is a scene where Jaya Nigam is about to leave her husband and son behind in Bhopal to train in Kolkata for the Kabaddi championship. Leaving her world behind to pursue a dream she abandoned  many years ago, Jaya is a nervous wreck. As the train is about to leave, her incredibly-supportive husband and  endearingly wise son wave a brave goodbye.

“You do remember how many whistles the pressure cooker has to give before the daal is ready?” she bleats pleadingly with her husband as the train moves away.

That  mundane farewell line of dialogue says  so much about  the film’s protagonist, and about every woman who hops on board  that train to complete interrupted dreams. It also says  a lot about the director. It is no coincidence  that Ashwini Iyer Tiwari is a wife and a mother in real life who must have faced those very anxieties insecurities and  career-versus-home dilemmas that Jaya faces as she reopens the  book of her  ambitions, with a support system that every ambitious woman would envy , each  played by an actor who seems  to have lived some of the character’s warm nurturing nature, if not all.

The husband played with such affection and warmth by Jassi Gill, who in the  jokey words of  Jaya’s  best friend and Kabaddi colleague Meenu (Richa Chadha) behaves  more like a love-struck boyfriend than a possessive husband (“Kaun apni biwi ko itna phone karta hai!”). The  best friend played with an emphatic gusto by  Richa Chadha, the cranky but supportive mother Neena Gupta,  Jaya’s wise little son (Yagya Bhasin,  whom I want to adopt immediately), the  astute Kabbaddi coach (Rajesh Tailang) and last but not the least the seemingly  hostile captain of the Kabbaddi team, the team that Jaya Nigam takes to (predictable) victory at the end, her years of matrimony motherhood and retirement be damned!

Every performer is so in character it seems as though the director has cast real people, not actors. Standing tall  in her role of smothered aspirations is Kangana Ranaut expressing so much of her character’s  yearnings, fears and insecurities through her eyes, you wish she would just stop talking.

Speaking of  talking, Panga has smart sassy lines of dialogue for every character even  the incidental ones.  When it comes to quips, director Ashwini and her writer  Nikhil Mehrohtra just can’t get enough. But these are words spoken with such lived-in  confidence you forget they’ve been specially written for the characters.

I’d have probably forgotten these are characters in a  film and  not people I know  in real life, if there wasn’t so much  background music constantly punctuating the emotions.Panga really needs no prompting to be loved. You  surrender to its affectionate  homage to the housewife’s  revived  dreams wholeheartedly.No  questions asked.