The Angrez

For Hyderabadis, Of Hyderabadis, By Hyderabadis - that is the short version of the Angrez. There has been so many movies about Bombay in this vein and probably many of us can do the Mumbaiyya slang without ever having to travel in local trains during Mumbai's rush hour. The Angrez is a tribute to the life and lingo of Hyderabad, an amateurish one, but entertaining nevertheless.

The life of the movie is Salim Phekku(Mast Ali), Ismail bhai(Raju Shrivastav) and the old city gang along with their Hyderabadi Deccani Urdu mixed Hindi. Delivered by true blue Hyderbadis, the movie you takes you on a romp through the Hyderabad of the locals. When you take a movie about the city that makes a living minting NRIs at a record rate, it has to be about NRIs. Nikkil Kunta(the director of the movie) and Ganesh Venkatraman plays the two NRIs who have come to India to become partners in a software company. Nikkil Kunta draws from his real life experiences as an American returned desi and two years of roaming around with his handycam in the Old City of Hyderabad capturing the life and lingo.

If you exclude the Old city guys and their antics, what remains is mostly half-baked, especially the NRI part. I am not sure NRI vocabulary is limited to sh*t and its variations. The last scenes of the movie which involves a girl crying over, what in my eyes, is a very decent way to propose a marriage could have been avoided.

Chudi bazaar,Bonalu prasadam, Banjara Hills, Hyderabadi Biriyani, Ganesha pooja and the quintessential NRI - the raison d’être of this movie was to showcase Hyderabad and it did that successfully. The rest of it could be forgotten, because if somebody had taken a movie about my home-town in this manner I'd have loved every minute of it, no matter how lousy the story.