IQBAL

When I came out of a theater watching IQBAL, immediately I wanted to congratulate IQBAL on getting selected in Indian cricket team. And there lies the success of the film. IQBAL is a story of an 18 year old boy from village who is deaf and dumb and how he achieves his dream of being a bowler in Indian team. You live every moment of the film. Rather Iqbal’s journey becomes your journey. Iqbal shows that Nagesh Kukunoor has matured as a director and Iqbal is his best work till date. But IQBAL clearly belongs to only one man and i.e. Shreyas Talpade. Shreyas delivers a knock-out performance in front of veterans like Naseeruddin Shah and Girish Karnad. Now I can not imagine any other actor playing Iqbal. Full marks to Shreyas in conveying not only the emotions of deaf and dumb boy but also the posture, body language of a bowler. One more strong point of the film is that nowhere director tries to give more footage to disability of the lead protagonist. Iqbal is deaf and dumb boy and the story ends there. Disable people live their own life and there’s nothing wrong in being disable. Also Nagesh never tries to capitalize on cricket. Yes, the film is cricket based, but its Nagesh’s brilliance that he shows Iqbal’s journey through cricket. There are many touching moments in 2 hours but over-dose of emotions has been avoided. Yatin Karyekar, Shweta Prasad, Pratiksha Lonkar all have delivered superb performances. And finally, thanks to Subhash Ghai for producing such a great movie.