If only journalists could make a fortune out of news. Disney+ Hotstar’s new series Taaza Khabar, starring YouTuber extraordinaire Bhuvan Bam, is about something out of a scribe’s dream. A man gets news updates on his mobile before the event even occurs. Talk about lightning-fast notifications.
Vasant Gawde aka Vasya (Bam) is the manager of a sulabh shouchalya and lives a life of poverty and misery. His mother is a housemaid and his father is a drunkard. He is in love with a prostitute, Madhu (Shriya Pilgaonkar), who is being obsessed over by local politician Shetty (JD Chakravarthy). So far, the series ticks all cliché boxes of a Mumbai slum tale. The twist comes when Vasya updates a news app (after an old, homeless woman blesses him below a peepal tree). Now, he knows things before they happen.
Taaza Khabar has an intriguing premise. Initially, it even tries to delve deeper into it. Knowing something beforehand makes one a fortune-teller not a businessman. Vasya understands that and now the question is to make money out of this vardaan, as he calls it, that too so many times it gets irksome. He gets his motley group of slum regulars to join his new ‘business venture’. The associates are something out of an eighties popular film teaching Congressional values of secularism. There is Vasya’s childhood friend Peter (Prathamesh Parab), local bakery shop owner Mehboob Bhai (Deven Bhojani) and his brainy daughter Shazia (Nitya Mathur), and Madhu.
The makers try to be inventive in the first three episodes. Vasya might know what is going to happen but how and when it does escape him. He might know the future but can’t shape it. The ‘businesses’ are also varied and range from getting a vase--which might contain gold--from an antique store, striking a deal with a quiz show contestant in exchange for the right answer or investing in bitcoin before it shoots up. But the ideas dry out eventually and the show resorts to the tired theme of rags to riches to ashes.
The series is basically what you get if Sacred Games’ Ganesh Gaitonde was the protagonist of Gully Boy. The fever of the Zoya Akhtar directorial is high in this one. From the scene where Vasya tries to protect his mother as she is being beaten up by his inebriated father, to him sitting in a black Mercedes, slamming his hands at the steering wheel and screaming in anguish as fairy lights reflect on the hood, all bear marks of the Ranveer Singh-starrer. The Gaitonde takes over as the makers’ imagination falters. Bam as Vasya, lying in bed with Shriya’s Madhu, even asks her, “Do you think I am god?”
Although the show, at points, feels like a Bam launch vehicle, he still impresses in instances. He shows his acting chops, especially in a scene where he has to lift an old woman who has fainted in the toilet. He expresses disgust and dejection in equal measure and it feels like he is trying to find his feet in a new territory. But it’s not enough. In sequences of emotional upheaval, Bam is still green. The runtime also doesn’t favour him. Since most episodes are just under 30 minutes, there is no time to build up the drama or unspool character psyches. Once the ‘business’ becomes centered on cricket betting, the novelty jumps out of the window and the surprise element evaporates.
Taaza Khabar does show promise at the start. It doesn’t play up Bam’s YouTube image, but rather than portraying him as an actor, it gets entangled in projecting him as the ‘hero’. It could have gone the other way and tell a story of how information is perceived, maybe Bam could have saved people from a natural calamity, thwarted an assassination attempt on a politician, prevented a riot or battled fake news. Maybe I am expecting too much.
Taaza Khabar Series
Cast: Bhuvan Bam,Shriya Pilgaonkar, JD Chakravarthy, Shilpa Shukla, Prathamesh Parab
Streaming on: Disney+ Hotstar
Rating: 2.5/5