March 2025 would be remembered for being one of the most fertile months on the OTT in recent times. While Stephen Graham’s Adolescence struck a chord all across the globe, in India, its success was a revelation. Yes, Netflix has much to be proud of. Adolescence has opened up debates worldwide on the parent-child relationship.
Do you really know what your child is up to? Just pray he is watching Dupahiya on Amazon. To me, this delightful take on bucolic Bachchanalia was a bigger triumph than Adolescence for two reasons: one, it is far tougher to keep the humorous momentum alive in episode after episode rather than revel in the mood of grimness. Also, I would prefer to take pride in something homespun.
Netflix’s Khakee: The Bengal Chapter, too, made India’s OTT platform a place of prideful achievement. A coiling-recoiling raga of rage plays itself out in the combustive length and breadth of this lengthy parable on crime and violence in the ‘City Of Bhoy (fear)’ as an activist character (all set to become the, ahem, chief minister of Kolkata) describes the crime situation in Kolkata.
Ram Madhvan’s The Waking Of The Nation, on the other hand, failed to kindle the patriotic sentiment. We have seen the Jallianwala Bagh pogrom done many times on screen, notably in Shoojit Sircar’s Udham Singh, and we will soon see Karan Johar revisit the carnage on the big screen in Kesari 2, far more effectively. Madhvani’s series was not bad. It was just…dull, a plodding depiction of a historical mishap.
Loot Kaand on Amazon, on the hand, yanked a real happening (arms drop in Purulia) and turned it into sone kind of a kinky, lanky fictional outing, replete with thumping action. Actors like Tania Maniktala and Sahil Mehta deserve better. So do we.
Finally, Kanneda on JioHotstar, about a rapper in Canada trying to wrap his head around a career in music and crime, was a letdown. In spite of a convincing performance by Parmish Varma, Kanneda remained a potentially explosive experience beaten down by its own lack of ambition.
