J
okes creep up in Sankat City rather innocuously and at the drop of a hat. Like the scene where someone wonders at the presence of a woman in the cop squad that has come to defuse a bomb in a Bombay building, only to be casually told by another: “Sri Lanka ki hogi”. Or the delectably loony sight of a henchman teaching a silly Gujju verse to an amnesiac: “Main kaun chhoon, mujhe khabar nathi”. There’s a boy-loving, beer-guzzling, fish-eating guruji who wants to have “nirvastra snaan” with the meek driver of his mobster disciple. Two “chhote sardars” lost in the Muktsar mela, Harnam and Gurnam, meet as adults, one has grown up to be a sardar taxi driver, other is, believe it or not, a Hyderabadi film duplicate called Sheshaiyya. On top of all this, there are some really harebrained lines like: “This land belongs to Gogi Kukreja. Prosecuters will be trespassed”.