Musafir Cafe: The Promises No One Made

I finished Musafir Cafe crying, and with absolutely no desire to see Chander end up with either woman.

That may sound contradictory for a relationship drama. It is not.

A story can move you without persuading you. You can understand why people love each other, grieve what they lose, feel the weight of everything they could have been, and still believe they should remain very far away from each other until they have spent some serious time understanding themselves.

That is what Musafir Cafe did for me.

It moved slowly, sometimes almost indulgently, but I did not mind that. There is a lack of unhurried relationship dramas on streaming right now, stories willing to sit inside conversations, silences and lives that change without a murder, scam or criminal empire forcing them forward. The performances are lovely, the songs know when to enter, and the mountains are photographed with the tenderness of someone who understands why people keep going back to them.

I had also returned from Mussoorie quite recently, which made watching it a little stranger. Every road felt familiar. The turns, the mist, the hill shops, the sudden opening of a view where you were expecting another wall of green. The series did not have to convince me that Chander could love the mountains enough to organise a life around them. I may understand that love as much as he does.

But the mountains are also where Musafir Cafe temporarily disguises its central problem.

They make everything feel possible.

The relationship is far less certain.

Chander, played with a quiet, wounded sincerity by Vikrant Massey, meets Sudha at an arranged-marriage setup that turns into something else before either of them has decided what that something should be. Sudha, played by Vedika Pinto, is impulsive, ambitious, fiercely attached to her independence and immediately resistant to the kind of life Chander appears to want. He wants marriage, family and eventually a café in the hills. She wants Mumbai, a legal career and the certainty that loving someone will not make her disappear inside their expectations.

They know they are different.

That is partly why they are drawn to each other.

Chander sees in Sudha a person who belongs completely to herself. Sudha sees in Chander someone capable of placing love at the centre of his life. Each contains the emotional capacity the other has never properly developed.

He does not know how to love without slowly abandoning himself.

She does not know how to let love influence her life without experiencing that influence as a threat to who she is.

For a while, this looks like complementarity.

It may actually be borrowed wholeness.

Chander gets to live near someone whose sense of self appears immovable. Sudha gets to experience the security of being loved by someone willing to rearrange himself around her. They feel expanded by the relationship and mistake that expansion for evidence that they can build a life together.

But being changed by someone is not the same as growing through them.

Chander does not learn from Sudha how to preserve himself within a relationship. Sudha does not learn from Chander how to make room for another person without interpreting that room as something taken away from her.

They continue outsourcing those missing parts to each other.

He needs her to remain a person.

She needs him to experience belonging.

Neither learns how to become both.

That is where Musafir Cafe becomes more interesting than the romance it appears to be telling. Because Chander and Sudha do not simply have different dreams. They have different definitions of what love is supposed to do to a life.

Chander believes love proves itself through how completely it can reshape you.

Sudha believes love is only safe while it does not erase the shape you have fought to create.

He is willing to disappear into “us.”

She is willing to lose “us” to preserve “me.”

Neither understands the middle.

And the middle is where partnership lives.

The most revealing part of their relationship is not that they make different decisions. It is that they almost never make a decision together.

When Sudha postpones or cancels her Mumbai plan, an opportunity to go to Delhi appears before Chander. For a split second, we see him consider it. Then he remembers what Sudha has given up and appears to decide against it.

But we do not see him directly refuse the offer.

More importantly, we do not see him tell Sudha.

There is no calm conversation in which he says that Delhi interests him, that he knows she has postponed Mumbai, that he does not want either of them to build resentment around an unspoken sacrifice. He allows her decision to determine his and quietly moves on to planning a Mussoorie trip for her.

It looks loving.

It is also the beginning of a private contract.

Chander believes Sudha has chosen their relationship by postponing Mumbai. He responds by giving up Delhi for the same relationship. In his mind, perhaps, they have now chosen each other.

Sudha does not know the full terms of that choice.

A sacrifice made without the other person’s knowledge cannot become a shared commitment. It remains a private decision, however loving its intention. And private sacrifices have a dangerous habit of becoming emotional debts the other person never agreed to incur.

Chander does not demand repayment consciously. I am not sure he would even describe what he has done as a debt. But when Mumbai returns, it does not arrive for him as an ordinary career decision. It collapses an agreement he believed they had already made.

The problem is that the agreement may only ever have existed inside his head.

Sudha does the same thing from the opposite direction.

In a conversation with her mother, she says that she wants to ask Chander to move to Mumbai with her. The possibility exists. She can imagine a future in which she does not have to choose between her career and the relationship.

Then she reaches Mussoorie and sees how happy Chander is there.

When Chander himself says that he will move to Mumbai, Sudha refuses.

Again, it looks loving. She sees the mountains in him. She understands that the café is not a passing fantasy but a life in which he appears fully himself. She does not want to become the reason he abandons it.

But she also makes that decision for him.

Chander chooses for Sudha by sacrificing himself.

Sudha chooses for Chander by refusing his sacrifice.

Both believe they are protecting the person they love. Both deny that person the right to participate in the choice.

That is one of the quieter dangers Musafir Cafe keeps circling. Sometimes deciding what is best for another person is an act of care. Sometimes it is how we escape the discomfort of letting them choose.

If Chander chooses Mumbai and regrets it, Sudha will have to live with the possibility that he diminished himself for her. If they discuss it properly, she will also have to admit what she wants from him and what she is prepared to give in return. It is safer to look at his happiness in Mussoorie, call it certainty and close the question herself.

She preserves his life, perhaps.

She also preserves herself from the responsibility of sharing it.

That is why their relationship begins breaking in Mussoorie but truly erupts later in Bhopal.

Mussoorie is still suspended reality. There are hills to look at, café locations to imagine and an older couple who see them as two people in love. Chander speaks about marriage and family. Sudha is visibly sad. From the outside, the story is easy to read: the man wants a future, the woman loves him but is frightened, and surely love this obvious must eventually find a way.

The older couple, Mark and Nilima, played by Adil Hussain and Sadiya Siddiqui, see feelings and assume infrastructure.

So do we.

Bhopal removes the scenery.

The pregnancy alarm introduces the body, the household and the possibility of an irreversible future. Suddenly, marriage is no longer something Chander vaguely wants one day. It becomes an immediate answer to a life that may already be forming. For Sudha, that same possibility threatens to turn her deepest fear into fact.

Chander sees a family taking shape.

Sudha sees her own shape disappearing inside it.

The “let us get married” conversation therefore amplifies everything they have avoided. Chander is not reacting only to a possible pregnancy. Sudha is not reacting only to a proposal. They are confronting the private futures each has been carrying while pretending they are moving towards the same one.

They are not.

The fight becomes loud, heated and ugly because it is carrying every conversation they never had calmly.

Chander’s silent sacrifices are there.

Sudha’s fear of being consumed by them is there.

His assumption that her postponed Mumbai plan meant she had chosen him is there.

Her suspicion that he will keep surrendering his life and eventually make her responsible for what he has lost is there.

His anger that he is always prepared to reorganise himself is there.

Her anger that his idea of love seems to require reorganisation from her too is there.

All of it has been waiting.

Then, for a few seconds, it escapes.

The dialogues tell us as much. They say to each other the very things the relationship has been avoiding. And almost immediately, they apologise. They say they did not mean it.

But what exactly did they not mean?

They may not have meant the cruelty. They may not have meant to cause that degree of pain. They may not have meant to say those things aloud.

That is different from never having felt them.

Anger is not a truth serum. It is an amplifier. It distorts, but it needs something already present to amplify.

Their accusations may be unfair in fact and still honest in feeling. The problem is that neither knows what to do with that honesty once the anger passes. To own it would mean admitting that their relationship cannot return to the romantic uncertainty in which it has survived until now.

So they apologise.

The apology repairs the violence of the delivery. It does not resolve the truth of the grievance.

In fact, their apology may be another act of avoidance. It allows them to categorise the fight as an unfortunate loss of control rather than evidence about the relationship itself.

Their fight may be their first entirely truthful conversation.

Their apology helps them pretend it was an aberration.

This is what the series understands about relationships, intentionally or otherwise. People do not always remain unclear because they lack communication skills. Sometimes clarity threatens the arrangement from which everyone is still receiving something.

As long as nothing is defined, Chander can imagine marriage.

Sudha can imagine freedom.

Both can continue loving the other without admitting that the life each imagines would require the other person to become someone else.

Ambiguity is not simply their problem.

It is the relationship’s survival mechanism.

And then there is Preeti.

Mahima Makwana plays her with such restraint that it becomes easy to call her the mature one. She knows about Sudha. She knows that Chander’s past is not fully past. She understands that there is a part of his heart she has not been allowed to inhabit, and still chooses to build a café, a home and five years of companionship beside him.

But knowing that someone has not fully chosen you does not automatically make staying with them an act of maturity.

Sometimes it only makes the hope more conscious.

Preeti gives Chander what he needed, or perhaps what he had once hoped to receive from Sudha. She stays. She supports his café. She shares his mountain life. She offers steadiness where Sudha brought uncertainty and companionship where Sudha’s ambitions repeatedly pulled her elsewhere.

Given Chander’s emotional state, it makes sense that he would believe he had fallen in love.

But Preeti is also his rebound.

Not because everything between them is false. Rebound relationships can contain real tenderness, shared work, genuine care and years of life. What makes a person a rebound is not the absence of feeling. It is the function the relationship is asked to perform.

Preeti helps Chander survive the person he could not have.

That does not necessarily mean he has stopped organising himself around her.

And this is where Chander’s hypocrisy becomes impossible to ignore.

This is a man who wanted marriage. He wanted a family. He wanted Sudha to choose the settled future he could see so clearly.

Then he spends five years with Preeti and does not marry her.

Why?

The uncomfortable answer may be that Chander did not want marriage in the abstract. He wanted Sudha to want marriage with him.

Her agreement would have proved something. That he was worth choosing. That their relationship mattered more than the freedom she guarded so fiercely. That the woman who had once kept one foot outside their shared life had finally placed both feet inside it.

Preeti’s love cannot repair that wound because Preeti did not create it.

He wanted a life with Sudha more than he wanted a life.

That is why seeing Sudha again can destabilise five years with Preeti so quickly. The years do not disappear. Their meaning becomes visible. Chander has built the life he claimed to want, in the place he always wanted it, with a woman willing to stay.

And still, some part of him is waiting for Sudha to reverse an old rejection.

Chander knows what it feels like to love someone who will not fully choose him.

Then he allows Preeti to live in precisely that position.

He wants to be chosen by the woman who could not choose him while refusing to fully choose the woman who did.

Preeti is not unaware of this. That is where her own responsibility begins.

She stays beside a man whose unresolved love is not hidden from her. She may believe that shared years will eventually weigh more than unfinished history. That steadiness will become more important than intensity. That if she gives Chander everything Sudha could not, he will one day stop distinguishing between the love he lost and the love that remained.

Preeti has written a private contract too.

If I stay, one day I will be chosen completely.

The ring she discovers near the end is almost painfully perfect in that context. It has not yet been offered to her. It was handed to Chander by someone else. He has made no proposal. Yet the sight of it fills her with relief because she immediately turns the object into confirmation.

The ring appears to tell her that the waiting meant something.

That five years were leading somewhere.

That patience has finally become permanence.

But once again, the promise exists before the conversation.

Preeti sees a ring and imagines a proposal. Chander sees Sudha and returns to an unfinished life. Sudha arrives carrying a departure she has already decided.

Everyone is living inside a different ending.

Rajeev Siddhartha as Rahil, the author who drifts into the café, could have complicated this beautifully if the series had given him more space. He sees Preeti beyond her role in Chander’s life. He sees the writer and traveller in her, the person whose own restlessness has been disciplined into supporting someone else’s dream. He is not necessarily a better romantic answer. That would only move Preeti from one man’s unfinished story into another.

But he reminds us that Preeti had a self before she became the woman who stayed.

The series does not give that self enough time.

It does not give Chander and Preeti’s five years enough time either. We are told and shown the ease of their companionship, but not enough of how it was built, what was promised, why marriage remained suspended or how Preeti kept negotiating with the knowledge that Sudha still existed between them.

Perhaps that is what a second season intends to explain.

That predictability is precisely why I do not want one.

Because the emotional question is already clear. More plot will not necessarily deepen it. It may only turn a relationship drama into a selection exercise.

Sudha’s final return makes that risk worse.

She has already visited Musafir Cafe once in secret and seen Chander with Preeti. She sees, or imagines, that he is happy. She has no life to offer him. She is moving forward with her own partner. By her own logic, the loving thing would be to leave Chander undisturbed.

Yet she comes back to meet him one last time.

There is no practical need for it.

There is an emotional one.

Perhaps Sudha wants closure. Perhaps she needs forgiveness. Perhaps she wants to see whether she still matters. Perhaps a part of her wants Chander to interrupt her departure without requiring her to ask him to.

Whatever the motivation, the contradiction remains.

Sudha wants to leave Chander, but she does not want to leave without witnessing what she still means to him.

She rejects his offer to move because she believes she knows where he belongs. Years later, she enters the life in which she imagines he has found that belonging and asks for emotional access to him again.

She cannot offer Chander the life he wants.

She cannot entirely surrender her place as the person he wanted it with.

That does not make her cruel. Sudha can be independent and selfish at the same time. Chander can be loving and emotionally unavailable at the same time. Preeti can be perceptive and still participate in her own prolonged heartbreak.

Every character is grey.

The problem begins when we turn greyness into goodness simply because a character articulates it beautifully.

The final Chander and Sudha conversation is moving. It is graceful in places, grateful in others, and the dialogue lands because both people finally possess enough distance to understand what the relationship gave them.

But understanding a pattern is not the same as outgrowing it.

They still meet after Sudha has already decided to leave. Chander still reacts to her decision after the decision exists. Sudha still enters his life seeking something she cannot clearly name. He still measures his agency against whether she stays.

Eight years have passed, but the emotional structure of the conversation remains painfully familiar.

Sometimes people learn to explain their patterns long before they learn to stop repeating them.

Chander’s insistence that this time he gets to decide is therefore not automatically evidence of growth. He has been deciding all along.

Not telling Sudha about Delhi was a decision.

Giving up his own wants according to hers was a decision.

Building five years with Preeti without marrying her was a decision.

Accepting the emotional privileges of being her partner while remaining attached to Sudha was a decision.

He only recognises his power to choose when Sudha returns because hers is the choice around which his identity remains organised.

The show seems to want us to wonder which woman Chander will choose.

I do not care.

More than that, I am not convinced the question deserves to be asked in the form the finale gives it.

Suppose Chander decides to remain at Musafir Cafe and asks Sudha to stay. Suppose she agrees. Would that be growth, or would the series simply have moved the sacrifice from one person to the other?

Eight years ago, Chander was prepared to move to Mumbai and allow his life to take the shape of Sudha’s ambition. Sudha refused because she believed he would lose himself.

If she now stays in Mussoorie because Chander has finally “decided,” the geography changes. The psychological arrangement may not.

Chander would still determine the destination.

Sudha would still be asked to prove love by reorganising her life around it.

A relationship does not become equal merely because the person making the sacrifice changes.

Relationships are built through compromise, but compromise requires two people to remain present in the conversation. It is not the same as sacrifice. Sacrifice allows one person to disappear and the other to inherit responsibility for the disappearance.

Chander sacrifices before Sudha can choose with him.

Sudha chooses herself before Chander can matter within the choice.

Preeti waits for Chander’s eventual choice to justify everything she has already sacrificed.

None of them is entirely dishonest. That may be the saddest part.

They are simply more honest about what they feel than about what those feelings are doing to the people around them.

Yes, Sudha is allowed to change. Living on your own terms does not mean remaining loyal forever to the ambitions of your younger self. Mumbai does not have to remain sacred simply because it once represented freedom. A person may choose love, partnership or even a quieter life without betraying her independence.

But the choice has to emerge from self-knowledge.

The series has not yet shown that.

It has shown Sudha arriving after already deciding to leave for Singapore with Vineet. It has shown her reopening an old relationship she claims she came to close. It has shown Chander admit that she still occupies a place in him that five years with Preeti have not displaced.

What it has not shown is either person doing the internal work required to build together what they could not build before.

Time has passed.

That is not the same as growth having occurred.

A second chance does not become mature merely because it arrives eight years later.

If Sudha stays now, the series will have to prove that she is choosing a life rather than surrendering to an unfinished emotion. Otherwise, the independent woman’s entire journey will be reduced to a delay before she finally accepts the romantic future Chander always wanted.

And what happens to Preeti in that ending?

Does five years of companionship become negligible the moment first love walks through the café door?

Preeti built Musafir Cafe with Chander. She participated in the ordinary, uncinematic labour of his life. She stayed through the memory of Sudha, supported the dream he once kept postponing and loved him with full knowledge that a part of him remained unavailable.

None of that means Chander owes her marriage.

But it does mean he owes those years moral weight.

If he chooses Sudha and the series frames that choice as courage, Preeti becomes collateral in another person’s grand love story. Her patience, work and emotional investment become a waiting room Chander occupied until the woman he truly wanted returned.

That would not make Chander a romantic hero.

It would make him a man who accepted the privileges of Preeti’s commitment while quietly reserving the right to leave when his unresolved past became available again.

He knows what it is to love someone who will not fully choose him.

There would be particular cruelty in making Preeti inherit the same wound.

And then there is Vineet.

He may barely be visible in this season, but invisibility does not make him disposable. Sudha is preparing to move to Singapore with him. He has presumably built a relationship with the woman Chander still experiences as unfinished business.

If Sudha abandons that life the moment Chander asks her to stay, Vineet becomes another Preeti: a present partner reduced to an obstacle between two people and the mythology of their first love.

That would reveal an unpleasant pattern.

Chander uses Preeti to survive Sudha.

Sudha uses Vineet to build a life beyond Chander.

Then Chander and Sudha return to each other, leaving the people who helped them live through the separation to absorb the consequences.

First love would become sovereign.

Everyone who came afterwards would become temporary.

There is nothing mature about that unless the series is willing to examine the damage honestly.

This is why the novel’s decision to keep Chander and Sudha apart feels more truthful to what their relationship actually taught them. Their love matters. They change each other. They remain emotionally significant. But significance does not have to culminate in possession.

Perhaps the most grown-up thing two people can do with a formative love is refuse to make it responsible for a future it was never capable of carrying.

Keeping them apart does not diminish what they had.

It respects what they learnt from losing it.

The book appears to understand that Chander and Sudha can remain part of each other’s emotional history without becoming each other’s final destination. The series had the opportunity to make that understanding its conclusion. One season was enough. The arc was already there.

Instead, it turns clarity back into suspense.

The cliffhanger asks whether Chander will choose Sudha or Preeti. But that question quietly restores him as the centre of three lives. Sudha’s growth, Preeti’s patience and Vineet’s relationship are all made to wait for his verdict.

“This time, I get to decide” may sound like Chander reclaiming agency.

It may also be the first time the series mistakes his need for control for character growth.

Because Chander has always been deciding.

He decided not to discuss Delhi.

He decided that Sudha’s postponed Mumbai plan represented a shared promise.

He decided to build five years with Preeti without marrying her.

He decided to accept her devotion while keeping his old love emotionally intact.

The problem was never that Chander lacked the power to choose.

The problem was that his choices kept being organised around whether another person stayed.

So no, I do not need to know which woman he chooses.

I need to know whether Sudha can choose a relationship without disappearing inside it.

Whether Preeti can stop treating patience as a path towards being chosen.

Whether Chander can build an identity that does not depend upon a woman confirming it.

And whether the series understands that love is not always honoured by reunion.

Sometimes love has already done everything it came to do.

The mature ending is knowing not to ask it for a life it was never equipped to build.

And yet, I cried.

I cried for Chander, because loving deeply does not teach a person how to love well.

I cried for Sudha, because choosing yourself can still require grieving every life that choice makes impossible.

I cried for Preeti, because patience can become a beautiful name for waiting in a place where you were never fully chosen.

I cried because the dialogues hit home, because the performances made every contradiction feel lived rather than theoretical, and because the last episode understood how much pain can remain even when everyone can finally explain what happened.

I did not cry because I wanted Chander and Sudha together.

I cried because the storytelling was good enough to make me mourn a relationship I still believe should have ended.

Cinema can earn your tears without earning your agreement.

Perhaps that is why the series stayed with me despite the cliffhanger, and why I do not particularly want to know what happens next. The person Chander chooses is the least interesting answer available. Sudha has already built a life. Preeti deserves one that is not organised around whether another woman returns. Chander has spent too long locating himself inside the decisions of the women he loves.

All three need clarity.

Possibly therapy.

Definitely time alone with the parts of themselves they keep asking relationships to carry.

Because that is what Musafir Cafe is ultimately about for me. Not soulmates, missed timing or the one person who changes you forever.

It is about people who privately imagine different futures, assign meaning to sacrifices and silences, and call the resulting intensity love.

Every one of them is honouring a relationship contract the other person never signed.

And perhaps these relationships did not begin ending in Mumbai, Mussoorie or Bhopal.

They began ending much earlier.

In the opportunity never mentioned.

In the question never asked.

In the future imagined alone.

In every silent sacrifice that became a promise, without ever asking the other person to make it. 

O’Romeo: A Filmmaker Second-guessing His Own Instincts

The most frustrating films are rarely the incompetent ones.

They are the films made by people clearly capable of better.

Because a bad film can be dismissed. You shrug, move on, and file it away as something that simply did not work. But a film made by someone whose brilliance you have already witnessed, someone who has previously trusted darkness, ambiguity, and tragedy in ways very few mainstream filmmakers do, carries a different kind of disappointment when it falters.

It does not merely fail.

It leaves you wondering why it chose to.

That is what O’Romeo felt like to me.

Not like a bad film. Not even like a failed one, entirely. More like a film made by someone standing at war with his own instincts, repeatedly pulling back just as his better sensibilities begin to surface. 

Whatever liberties it may take with the history or source material behind it, the film in front of us still has to stand on its own terms.

And the most interesting part is that Vishal Bhardwaj, who made Omkara and Haider, is still visible here. You can hear him in the music, you can feel him in the quieter, stranger moments. In the pauses, in the wounded silences, and in the stretches where the film briefly stops trying to impress you and simply allows itself to exist.

The problem is that O’Romeo keeps interrupting that version of itself.

It keeps choosing scale over depth, heroism over ambiguity, spectacle over tragedy. It keeps behaving like a film afraid of not being entertaining enough, even when everything interesting about it lies in the moments where it stops trying so hard to entertain.

That tension defines the entire experience.

Because on paper, this should have worked.

Shahid Kapoor, reunited with the filmmaker who has drawn some of the most compelling performances of his career from him, plays Ustara with enough early unpredictability to suggest another layered Bhardwaj protagonist may be on the horizon. There is a strange stillness to him at first. Something off-centre, almost like a sharpness under the skin. He enters the film carrying the kind of uneasy charisma that makes you pay attention.

And then the writing begins sanding him down.

The issue with Ustara is not performance. Shahid Kapoor does what he can. The issue is that the film cannot decide whether he is meant to be a psychologically volatile man shaped by violence and institutional rot, or a star vehicle protagonist who periodically requires applause-worthy hero moments.

And once the latter instinct begins taking over, the character loses gravitas.

He starts as someone you watch carefully, and then he gradually becomes someone the film wants you to cheer for too easily.

That shift hurts him more than anything else.

Because Vishal Bhardwaj’s best protagonists are rarely heroic in conventional ways. They are fractured, petty, brilliant, weak, and dangerous in ways that make you uncomfortable to align with them. Ustara could have belonged to that lineage.

Instead, O’Romeo often treats him like it is afraid of making him too difficult to love.

And in softening him, it makes him less interesting.

That same problem extends to Avinash Tiwary’s character, perhaps even more severely.

The film spends an extraordinary amount of time building him up before he ever appears. He is spoken of in mythic terms. The kind of off-screen mythology that should create dread. Add to that Avinash Tiwary’s striking physical transformation, which renders him nearly unrecognisable, and the expectation becomes obvious: this is meant to be a seismic arrival.

But the film mistakes anticipation for payoff.

He arrives, yes. He occupies the frame well enough. But the narrative never actually builds the character beneath the image. We are told he matters, told he is feared, told he and Ustara share a bond so deep that one can feel the other in danger.

But told is all we ever are.

At one point, when the film gestures toward a brotherhood between them, it should land like history.

Instead, it lands like exposition.

Because shared history only works when the film does the labour of making us believe it.

O’Romeo often seems to think that saying something is enough to make it true.

The film wants weight without construction. It wants emotional shorthand where emotional architecture is required. It wants us to feel the force of relationships, histories, betrayals, and rivalries that have not actually been built with sufficient care.

And nowhere is that more frustrating than in how it handles Tripti Dimri’s character.

Because unlike many female leads in male-led action dramas, she begins with promise. There is enough substance in her early writing to suggest she may become central in a way that matters. Her recovery phase in Ustara’s den, in particular, contains some of the film’s most restrained and effective emotional beats. There, briefly, O’Romeo quietens down enough to remember that intimacy can be more compelling than spectacle.

You begin to think the film may trust that instinct.

It does not.

From roughly the Ganesh visarjan sequence onward, her character begins losing shape. Agency recedes. The complexity implied earlier starts thinning out. By the time the climax arrives, she has largely been repositioned into a more passive narrative function, waiting for the men around her to complete the story.

And when she finally acts, it feels less like a culmination and more like an obligation.

What should have been an earned confrontation becomes a hurried insertion into a climax that has already emotionally resolved itself elsewhere.

It is one of many moments where the film chooses expedience over emotional truth.

Even the supporting cast reflects this excess. Actors like Nana Patekar, Farida Jalal, Tamannaah Bhatia, and Disha Patani are present enough to suggest significance, but are rarely used with enough narrative purpose to justify their presence. They add texture to the frame, not weight to the story.

Which leaves O’Romeo in an odd position.

It is not empty.

There is too much talent, too much craft, too much residual instinct for it to be empty.

But it is compromised.

Because you can see the film it might have been if it had trusted itself more.

A darker one, a slower one. One less interested in applause and more interested in consequence. One willing to let its characters remain morally difficult. One willing to end in tragedy rather than resolution. One less concerned with mass spectacle and more willing to embrace the Shakespearean weight its title seems to promise.

Instead, what we get feels like a filmmaker trying to split the difference.

Trying to make a Vishal Bhardwaj film and a broad-appeal commercial entertainer at the same time.

And in doing so, fully becoming neither.

That may ultimately be what disappoints most.

Not that O’Romeo is bad.

It isn’t.

It is watchable. Occasionally compelling. At times, even briefly excellent.

But the flashes of excellence only make the surrounding compromises more visible.

Because every time the music swells in that unmistakably Bhardwaj way, every time a quieter scene lingers long enough to breathe, every time the film briefly stops trying to be larger than life and allows itself to become stranger, sadder, more intimate, you are reminded of the filmmaker this could have belonged to.

And then the film pulls away from him again.

O’Romeo does not feel like a director losing his voice.

It feels like a director hearing it clearly and choosing, repeatedly, not to trust it.

And that, more than failure, is what lingers.

Not the sense that this film did not work.

But the sense that somewhere beneath it was a much better one.

And that Vishal Bhardwaj knew it too.

Matka King: The White Suit and the Rot Beneath It

I started Matka King very reluctantly and randomly, expecting a gangster story, thinking I was watching a rise.

Not because the show promised anything simplistic, but because the Indian streaming ecosystem has trained us well by now. Put a morally grey man in period clothing, hand him an empire to build, and somewhere along the way, the camera will ask you to admire the violence it takes to get there.

That is usually how these stories announce themselves. A man begins with nothing, a city is larger than him, and the system is older than him. Then slowly, through instinct, hunger, luck, and a little moral compromise, he builds something that becomes impossible to ignore.

For a while, Matka King lets you believe that it is that story too.

Brij Bhatti begins as someone you want to root for. There is something deeply attractive about his certainty in those early episodes. There is not an ounce of arrogance yet. Just a kind of clean confidence where he believes in work, in fairness, and in integrity amidst the corrupt power surrounding him. He has that rare quality of a man who still thinks principles can survive contact with ambition.

And because Vijay Varma plays him with such ease, you believe him.

That is the trap.

You do not watch Brij become corrupt in one dramatic moment. There is no single scene where the man you admired disappears, and the monster arrives in his place. It is slower than that. Quieter, more uncomfortable. He changes by learning how to explain himself better. Every compromise that he has to make when the world wants to pull him down, finds a justification. Every betrayal he faces gets wrapped in purpose. Every wound he causes becomes, in his mind, part of a larger design only he is brave enough to see.

That is what makes Matka King interesting. Not the gambling, not the empire of satta matka that the real-life Ratan Khatri (whose life the character is loosely based on) created, and not even the underworld.

It is the slow horror of watching a man mistake his own mythology for morality.

Brij’s “integrity” is one of the show’s sharpest ideas, almost like a character study. At first, it feels real and almost old-fashioned. He wants to do things differently. He wants to build something cleaner in the world of gambling than the men before him. He wants to believe that he is not like Lalji Bhai, not like the men who profit from desperation without ever touching its consequences.

But integrity, in Brij’s hands, begins to change shape.

It stops being instinct and becomes all about image.

The white suit he starts donning says it before he does. It is not subtle, and perhaps it does not need to be. Brij wears purity like a costume long after purity has left him. The cleaner he looks, the more compromised he becomes. The more he speaks of legacy and not compromising on honesty in gambling, the less he can see the people standing in front of him.

That is the real rot.

Not greed alone. Greed would have been simpler to defend.

Brij’s downfall is more dangerous because he still believes he is noble.

This is where Vijay Varma becomes impossible to look away from. He does not play Brij as a villain waiting to be revealed. He plays him as a man who keeps adjusting the mirror until he can still recognise himself in it. There is charm, warmth, calculation, insecurity, pride, tenderness, and cruelty, often within the same stretch of silence. You understand why people follow him. You also understand why they eventually begin to fear him.

I fell in love with Vijay Varma while watching this. Not in the casual “good performance” way. More in the sense that you begin trusting an actor so completely that even when the writing slows (and in 50-min episodes, it does), your attention stays because he is still working, still shifting, and still letting something decay behind the eyes.

And Matka King gives him a strong world to decay within.

Lalji Bhai (Gulshan Grover) represents the older system that Brij first enters. He is the established order, the man who understands power as control, access, dominance, and hierarchy. Brij’s early rebellion against him feels almost righteous because Lalji Bhai belongs to a world that already looks morally exhausted. You want Brij to defeat him because Brij seems to promise something different.

That promise is what makes the later transformation hurt.

Because Brij does not simply defeat Lalji Bhai. He absorbs the logic of the system and then convinces himself he has improved it.

Darab (Viineet Kumar Siingh's cameo) stands at the other end of that journey. If Lalji Bhai is the old order, Darab is the future waiting with less patience and more blood. He represents the future world Brij thinks he can outsmart, contain, or negotiate with. But men like Darab are not interested in Brij’s idea of ethics. They are what happens when power stops pretending it needs dignity.

Between Lalji Bhai and Darab, Brij is trapped between the past he wants to replace and the future he cannot control.

And somewhere in that space, he loses himself without realising.

The tragedy is that people keep showing him what he has become, but he refuses to acknowledge it (or even act on it.)

Barkha (Sai Tamhankar), his wife, sees it first, or at least sees it most clearly. She is not just the moral anchor of the show; she is the life Brij betrayed. Her becoming stoic is not a dramatic rebellion. It is quieter than that, and stronger because of it. She refuses to let his money or empire become her son’s inheritance. She refuses to let comfort become complicity.

She is right to leave.

But her leaving breaks something in Brij, too. The thread that connected the old Brij to the new one.

That is the painful part. The people who do the right thing around Brij also become mirrors he cannot bear to look into. Barkha’s refusal tells him that his story about himself is no longer convincing. Not to her. Not to the person who knew him before the suit, before the numbers, before the throne.

And then there is Anmol, his son.

A child’s refusal carries a different kind of violence. Adults can argue, adults can justify, adults can lie to protect themselves. A child refusing to meet you leaves no room for performance. It says what no speech can say.

You have lost the future you thought you were building for.

His brother Lachu’s (Bhupendra Jadawat) betrayal and confrontation cut differently. He is not simply the brother who wrongs him or gets wronged by him. He is part of the life Brij came from. The family line, the original world, and in fact, the reason why he started his whole journey in satta matka. When that relationship breaks, the damage is not only emotional. It is structural. It shows that Brij’s empire is no longer expanding outward; it is eating inward.

Brij wanted to build something that would protect his people.

Instead, it becomes the thing his people need protection from.

Dagdu (Siddharth Jadhav) may be the show’s most quietly devastating presence. He begins as witness, companion, narrator, and almost keeper of Brij’s humanity. He sees the man before the myth settles fully over him. His loyalty does not feel blind at first; it feels grateful. Human. There is affection in it, and pity too.

That is why the shift matters.

For so long, Dagdu calls him “Seth.” There is reverence in that word. Habit too, yes, but also distance. Brij is above him, ahead of him, someone to serve, follow, explain, protect.

And then betrayal arrives.

Suddenly, he is Brij.

Not Seth.

Brij.

It is such a small linguistic shift, but it says everything. Respect does not always die with a scream. Sometimes it dies in how someone says your name.

Dagdu turning grey does not make him less moving. If anything, it makes him more human. He does not break because he is greedy; he breaks because Sulbha (Jamie Lever) becomes the line. There is only so much watching, absorbing, and enduring a person can do before loyalty begins to feel like self-harm.

That is another thing Matka King understands well. Brij does not fall alone. He pulls everyone into the moral weather of his own making. The people around him are forced to become harder, quieter, more compromised versions of themselves simply to survive proximity to him.

Gulrukh (Kritika Kamra) is different. A young, beautiful widow cut off from her family, she first enters Brij’s life as access to a world otherwise closed to him, the polished, elite circles his ambition has always looked toward but never fully belonged in. But what begins as strategic proximity gradually becomes something more corrosive.

Whatever exists between them never feels like love. Not truly.

Gulrukh sees the king in Brij before most others do, and Brij, by then, has slowly already begun craving that version of himself. In her admiration, he finds not intimacy but affirmation. She reflects back to him the man he wants to believe he has become. As she rises beside him into the role of the Matka Queen, becoming the refined face of the empire in rooms his usual world could never enter, she does not merely accompany his ascent; she accelerates it.

Because Gulrukh does not pull Brij away from who he is. 

She rewards him for becoming someone else.

That makes her dangerous.

Not because she corrupts him, but because she confirms him.

Barkha knew Brij before he needed an audience. Gulrukh meets him closer to or on his way to the throne. And Brij, by then, is already beginning to prefer admiration over intimacy.

There is a cruelty in that, too.

Not loud cruelty. The ordinary kind. The kind where a man starts choosing the version of himself that flatters him most, and calls that destiny.

The show’s most revealing moment, for me, is not one of the big confrontations. It is the situation around his brother’s wedding. On paper, it is almost a flex. Brij showing what he can do, how far his system reaches, and how much he knows & controls.

But emotionally, it feels like something darker.

It is the moment where he begins to behave as if probability and fate are the same thing. As if knowing people and patterns means controlling outcomes. As if the world itself has become another matka number he can read before anyone else.

That is where the God complex begins to show.

Not in violence.

In certainty. And the people around him can't help but notice.

The pacing does hurt the show at times. There are stretches where you feel the length, places where the series lingers without deepening as much as it could. A tighter version may have carried more force. But even when it slows, the character work keeps the centre intact. You stay because Brij is still changing, and because everyone around him is changing in response.

That matters.

Because Matka King is not at its best when it explains the mechanics of matka, detailed though those explanations are. It is at its best when it shows what happens to a man who begins believing that honesty in one part of his life can excuse corruption in all the others. Brij convinces himself that because he brought integrity to the game, because he made matka fair where others made gambling crooked, everything else can be rationalised. The lies, the betrayals, the compromises, the blood around the business, none of it, in his mind, negates who he is at his core. If the foundation is honest, he believes the structure built on top of it cannot truly be rotten.

And the finale makes that clear.

By the time Brij is shot in prison, the honest version of him has already been dying for a long time. The bullet is not the end of innocence. It is only the confirmation. The man who once believed in integrity has already turned integrity into performance, family into collateral, loyalty into debt, and ambition into destiny.

By then, the white suit still remains, but is stained by blood.

That is perhaps the cruellest part of it.

The image survives longer than the man does. The performance of purity outlives the purity itself. Even when everything beneath it has changed, Brij continues dressing like someone untouched by what he has become.

And maybe that is the tragedy in its simplest form: he does not stop pretending because he no longer knows he is pretending.

That is why I am not sure I am excited for Season 2 in the usual way.

I will watch Season 2. Of course I will. I want to know what happens next.

But I also suspect the most compelling part of Matka King may already be behind us.

The empire may grow or fall from here, the violence may escalate, the world may get bloodier, louder, harsher, but we have seen versions of that story before.

What made this season linger was not the king after the crown. What I found more compelling was this season’s quieter tragedy.

It was the man before the myth fully swallowed him.

And that man, I think, is already gone, fully disappeared into it.

Maybe that is why Matka King stayed with me. Not as a perfect show. Not as something without pacing issues or flaws. But as a story about a man who outlives the best version of himself and keeps calling it success.

Some falls are loud. Some are public. Some arrive with blood, betrayal, and prison walls.

But some begin much earlier.

In a white suit.

In a justified lie.

In the moment a man stops asking whether he is still good, because too many people have already started calling him great.

Heavy Is the Head: Dhurandhar and the Discomfort It Refuses to Resolve

I did not walk into Dhurandhar curious about box office numbers, controversies, bans, or counter-opinions. All of that arrives later anyway, whether you invite it or not. I walked in with something quieter. A question I did not know how to phrase yet.

Some films announce themselves loudly. They demand allegiance, applause, and agreement. But Dhurandhar does not ask. It confronts. And confrontation is a different kind of intimacy.

The film is three and a half hours long. You feel it. Not as fatigue, but as weight. Dhurandhar does not rush you through its world. It insists you sit with it. With its chapters. With its pauses. With its certainties. It is structured deliberately, broken into segments that feel almost literary, each chapter tightening the emotional screws just a little more. When the final chapter arrives, titled Et Tu, Brute?, it feels earned rather than clever. A question mark hanging over loyalty, betrayal, and history itself. Also, a subtle nod to Shakespeare (IYKYK)!

Today, days later, I remember the theatre more than the trailer. The stillness before the screen lit up. The faint shuffling that stops when people realise this is not going to be an easy watch, right from the first scene. A collective bracing. That moment always tells you more than the opening credits.

There is something unsettling about films that refuse to be just entertainment. They don’t let you lean back fully. They don’t allow detachment. You are pulled into proximity with things you would otherwise prefer to keep at arm’s length. History. Violence. Loyalty. Fear. And the uncomfortable ways these things overlap.

Dhurandhar lives there.

What struck me early on was the tone of this espionage thriller. Not the scale. Not the action. The tone. There is a heaviness that does not come from background score or dialogue alone. It comes from intention. The film knows exactly what it wants to evoke, and it does not soften the edges to make itself more palatable.

This is not a film interested in neutrality.

And that, in itself, is worth sitting with.

Ranveer Singh’s performance has been spoken about enough, so I will not rehearse adjectives. What stayed with me was not the intensity but the control. The restraint underneath the ferocity. The sense that the character is always a step away from unravelling, yet never fully allowed to. That tension is exhausting to watch. It is meant to be.

But the film is not held together by one performance alone. It is held together by a shared understanding of silence. The pauses. The looks that linger too long. The moments where nothing is explained because explanation would dilute impact. And the chemistry between, surprisingly, all the main faces.

Akshaye Khanna, currently and rightfully termed the legend, brings something rarer. He does not demand attention. He commands it quietly. There is a sharpness in his performance, a precision that feels almost surgical. Every word feels weighed. Rahman Dakait feels like someone who has seen empires rearrange themselves around him and learned to remain indispensable to all of them. Khanna plays him not as a criminal, but as a historian of violence. 

Arjun Rampal carries his character, Major Iqbal, with a bruised masculinity that feels lived-in. There is fatigue in his eyes, scars on his face, and history in his shoulders. He represents the kind of man who has been tested too many times to become what he is.

R. Madhavan represents the bureaucratic spine of intelligence history. The planners. The analysts. The men who never pull triggers but know exactly where the bullets will land. Historically, these figures shaped outcomes from rooms far removed from the field, operating on information, probability, and long-term consequence. His character is someone burdened by foresight. He knows too much to be idealistic and too much to be cynical. That tension never leaves his face.

And then there is Sanjay Dutt. Our very own Sanju Baba. There is something mythic about seeing him in a role like this. His physicality, his voice, and the weight he brings from his own cinematic history bleed into the character he plays. You are not just watching a man. You are watching a legacy walk into the frame.

Additionally, special shoutouts to Danish Pandor, Rouhallah Gazi, Sara Arjun, Gaurav Gera, Rakesh Bedi, Naveen Kaushik, and Saumya Tandon; people without whom the movie would’ve been incomplete.

Together, these characters do not just inhabit a story. They carry (real) histories of power exercised quietly, brutally, and often invisibly. Knowing where they come from makes it easier to understand why they behave the way they do.

And harder to judge them cleanly.

What surprised me most was the music.

Not just because it works, but because of how it works.

The film brings back iconic songs and reframes them without stripping them of their soul. That is not easy. Nostalgia is a dangerous tool. Used lazily, it collapses into a gimmick. Here, it becomes emotional shorthand. The familiarity anchors you, while the context unsettles you. Songs you thought you knew feel heavier, darker, more intimate.

“Nazar aur sabr” becomes more than a dialogue. It becomes a thesis. Watchful patience. Seeing without flinching. Waiting without weakening. The music does not interrupt the narrative. It deepens it. Lyrics surface quietly, almost like thoughts rather than performances, and you end up interpreting the meaning behind them as you watch the action unfold on screen before you.

And when you are too deep into the movie, suddenly, it is almost time for interval, and you’re jolted back to reality with the red screen and get reminded about the characters being portrayed in the movie.

There is a particular sequence that many people have spoken about, connected to a real collective wound. I will not describe it here. Not because it is taboo, but because description feels unnecessary. If you have lived with that history, your body recognises it before your mind does. The reaction is physical. A tightening. A discomfort that has nothing to do with cinematic technique. And you don’t even realise it till you suddenly unclench your teeth, open your fists and take a deep, trembling breath.

This is where the film becomes divisive, and understandably so.

Some viewers feel seen. Others feel provoked. Some feel retraumatised. And some respond with defensiveness. None of these reactions are wrong. They are responses to memory, not fiction. The film becomes a mirror, and mirrors rarely flatter everyone at once.

What interested me more was how quickly conversations around Dhurandhar stopped being about the film and started being about allegiance. 

To like it meant something. To critique it meant something else. 

Nuance became suspicious. Silence became complicity. Appreciation became endorsement.

That is a dangerous space for art to occupy, but also an honest one.

Cinema, at its most powerful, has always been political even when it pretends not to be. What Dhurandhar does differently is refuse the pretence. It does not attempt balance as a moral exercise. It chooses a side and commits to it fully.

You may agree with that choice. You may not. But you cannot accuse the film of being unaware of what it is doing.

There is also a curious undercurrent of discomfort visible online, especially in how people talk around the film rather than about it. Jokes. Memes. Deflections. Or maybe even the now viral and legendary dance sequence in reels. Humour is often how we metabolise things we are not ready to confront directly. Turning intensity into digestible fragments. Reducing threat through repetition and laughter.

That too is part of the film’s afterlife.

For me, the most unsettling aspect was not the violence or the nationalism. It was the emotional certainty the film operates within. There is little room for ambiguity inside the narrative itself. The ambiguity exists only in the audience’s response. That inversion is intentional.

We are used to films that leave interpretation open. Dhurandhar leaves the reaction open instead.

As I walked out almost four hours later, I noticed people speaking in lowered voices. Some animated. Some quiet. Some angry. Some thoughtful. Very few indifferent. Indifference is usually the real verdict, and this film does not earn that.

Days later, what remains with me are not scenes but sensations. The weight of history pressing against personal identity. The discomfort of recognising how easily stories become symbols. How quickly art becomes a stand-in for belief. How fragile nuance becomes in moments of collective emotion.

I will watch Dhurandhar again. Not to catch details I missed, but to see what shifts the second time. 

All I know is that this is a film that will be revisited by conversation, debate, and memory. It will be cited. It will be defended. It will be rejected. It will be reframed.

And perhaps that was always the point.

Some films entertain. Some films impress. A few films unsettle the ground beneath the viewer and then leave them there, without instructions on how to feel next.

Dhurandhar does that. 

What you do with that discomfort says more about you than it does about the film.

And maybe that is where its real power lies.

The post-credit trailer for Part 2, Revenge, arriving in March 2026, does not feel like a promise. It feels like a warning. This story is not done with us yet. And perhaps, more importantly, it is not done asking questions it knows will not have easy answers.

I’ll leave you here, because the title track of the film already understands what the movie is circling around, far better than any explanation can.

“I’m a king, but I’m far from a saint.
They call me a bad man, that’s a f*cking good thing.
Mama said, swing back when another man swings.
So I make my mama proud and make the hits rain.
Father, forgive me, I can’t forgive them.
You know my history, you know what I did then.
What I do now, a whole lot worse.
Heavy is the head, it’s a blessing and a curse…”

That is Dhurandhar in essence. Power without absolution. History without innocence. A man shaped by what came before him, and condemned by what he chooses next. The crown weighs heavy not because it shines, but because it remembers.

And that weight, once felt, does not leave you easily.