Films with a strong social message are great. If done right they make for compelling viewing and tug at the heart strings. In fact Nila Madhab Panda’s previous outings like I am Kalam and Kadvi Hawa are good examples of how socially relevant topics can be woven creatively into the story to stunning effect.
However, Halkaa (a Hindi slang which means to relieve oneself) somehow ends up being a feature length trailer of our governments’s Sochalay Banao project! There is Swatch Bharat, the Shiv Nadar School foundation, Mahatma Gandhi and even Parryware, the well known bathroom accessories brand that makes lengthy appearances. Join the dots and you know the story already!
The jan hitt mein jari message is clear – to stop open defecation; and the hero of our film is pretty defiant about it.
Young Pichku (Tathastu) with a heightened olfactory sense refuses to join in the morning ablution rituals that would mean squatting on his haunches and relieving himself at the railway tracks. His father (Ranvir Shorey) can’t understand why his son can’t be like others and man up to the reality.
Pichku’s only support is his always smiling mother (Paoli Dam) who tries to reason with the foul mouthed husband about getting a toilet built for their son, but to no avail. In fact, there is a whole sequence complete with a song when the little boy Pichku is being dragged by his dad through the basti to make him take a dump at the railway tracks.
The boy somehow manages to escape but there is no such respite in sight for the rest of us wondering why such a scene would even warrant a peppy song. To make light of the obnoxiousness?
Pichku’s Toilet Ek Prem Katha plan has to go through many saboteurs before all stumbling blocks can be flushed out. So we witness corrupt government officials, an unfeeling dad who wants to siphon off the money being given to build a toilet and buy himself a rickshaw, and general ridicule at the hands of slum dwellers who look at his inability to defecate openly as a weakness.
Things improve both for Pichku and the film when we meet another boy Gopi who too can’t relieve himself openly.
Halkaa has its heart at the right place and the two young boys Tathastu and Aryan Preet are delightful as they try and build a toilet they can call their own but the story itself moves on in a lumbering fashion, weighed down by its socially relevant message.
Everyone seems to be going through the motions (no pun intended).
Paoli Dam’s manicured hands and not-a-hair-out-of-place-de-glam look makes her character seem out of place in the typical basti-like milieu. Kumud Mishra is handed a badly written character of a quack who is supposed to bring in the comic element. The false notes are too many for us to ignore.
There is even a rich kid with a golden heart thrown into the fray who develops a kinship with ‘basti ke bachhe’ and later talks about how these kids can smile even in the face of such adversity. But by then most of us are looking for a loo break too.
A subtler handling of this very important issue about national hygiene would have gone a long way in making us invest in the on screen proceedings.
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