Rocket Singh: The Task of Zero
Print[Sorry,one more Rocket review. Had to break the writer's block]
I had a great weekend with three good movies after a long long time. The movies were Paa, Rocket Singh Salesman of the Yearand Chalo Let’s Go (a Bangla film by Anjun Dutt).
All the three movies had an intrinsic feel-good humane factor on them and I thought of writing about the film I could associate the most, (probably like many others) – Rocket Singh Salesman of the Year!
Rocket Singh is a movie about work culture in Indian offices and its conflict with individual aspirations. Before seeing the movie, I have read that every good reviewer, who has seen Boiler Room or Glengarry Glen Ross (I have not seen this one) can’t refrain from mentioning them on the context. After seeing the movie I can understand why.
Rocket Singh is not the first film to be made on the subject of dirty office politics, unethical business policies, honesty and values- we have Bhandarkar’s unbelievably melodramatic Corporate, which was more like a soap (in a laundry, pun intended). Then we have subtle humane treatment of the subject in classics like Sai Paranjpye’s Katha (1983) which showcases the different paths chosen by the protagonists in the workplace, amazingly portrayed by Farookh Sheikh and Nasiruddin Shah. Rocket Singh scores somewhere in between. The term ‘Rocket’ also reminds me of one of my delhiwala colleague who often used the term ‘this is no rocket science’. Indeed it is not, to make a movie worth watching.
Ranbir, the valuable zero
The plot premise and characters are fairly practical thought not exactly convincing enough to plug the intriguing missing links. A nice serious looking young surd, Harpreet Singh, is an academically challenged fresh graduate living with his grandpa (Prem Chopra- adorably impressive and snug). On his first interview with a company in the business of assembled PCs, his efforts are noticed by the company chief and he is immediately hired as a salesman. Various characters emerge in the scene- a stone faced bitchy (and compensating-ly sexy) receptionist, a sales boss with weird side burns and mush, a no nonsense well networked MD, a perpetually horny Hyderabadi IT geek, an underdog timid peon and a bunch of target driven salesmen, always biting others back and throwing rockets to our man, Harpreet. Soon enough, conflicts surface, bubbles of illusions burst by pins of reality and the characters gets stitched into a fairy tale like storyline where the line between dishonesty and retribution is blurred, (in typical Jaideep Sahani panache demonstrated earlier in his Khosla Ka Ghosla) to a desirable, dramatic and outspoken climax with an age old ‘moral of the story’. It’s like Panchatantra, retold.
What I liked in this movie is definitely the characters and the superb cast. Standing ovation to Abhimanyu Ray for one of the best assembled cast and Director Shimit Amin for getting delightfully enjoyable performances out of them. Sample the motley crew (not in any order of though)-
Ranbir Kapoor as Harpreet Singh Bedi is calm, innocent, honest and thus vulnerable, yet firm. Not an easy combo to find, these days. He represents the work force of common man which runs the machinery with their sweat and wipes it with their tie. Basically, a ‘zero guy’ who makes it big and fast.
As I mentioned earlier, Prem Chopra as P.S. Bedi is a surprise treat in a short role.
Girish Reddy aka Giri (Raghav Lawrence) – The horny Hyderabadi, who sleeps in the office when not watching swimsuit babes. Curly hair, droopy eyes, wicked grin, genuine lingo and bankable attitude- surely one of the notable performances in the movie.
Shazahn Padamsee as Sherena reminds me of Juhi Chawla in her Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman days. She looks fresh and does whatever she was supposed to in her minuscule role. However minuscule role doesn’t necessarily need miniscule dresses, the director may note. Or is it that leg-piece defines the quality of a debut chic?
Chhotelal Mishra (Mukesh Bhatt)- this guy was great in Gulaal, good to see he is getting bigger roles to portray his talent. I am sure he is of the same caliber of the underrated actors like Vijay Raaz and Sanjay Mishra.
Nitin Rathore (Naveen Kaushik)- this guy definitely reminded me of Van Diesel in Boiler Room. Sharp, smart, penetrative and sadistic to colleagues- an ideal salesman! Wish his make up was better.
Koena (Gauhar Khan, Sister of Negar Khan) – stern front office lady with a twisted humour quotient.
Boss Puri (Shanthnoo Bhagyaraj)- little over dramatized of the lot and definitely not the best make up example with that artificial mush.
However, there are some aspects of the film which I didn’t like.
The body language, characteristics, lingo of the people doesn’t really fit Mumbai. Any Mumbai salesman worth his second class season ticket will vouch for that. No salesman travels from Mira Road to Nariman point in a scooter. That happens in Delhi. The boss Puri is just out of a Nehru Place or a Lajpat Nagar office, not a Grant road guy. The PC parts vendor Lalwani looks more like a Chandni Chowk guy. Overall, the premise screams of a Delhi flavour, which seems to be forced to portray as Mumbai, for unexplained reasons.
Some parts of the script are just loose. I did think about some inevitable questions-
Which part of Mumbai were Harpreet staying? ( like KKG was very clear on the locality)
Why is Harpreet Singh staying with his grandpa? Why there’s no mention of his parents, even once?
How did Harpreet afford to drink in plush lunge bars with his friends?
What business was Sherena and her partner into?
How can you make a convincing Mumbai movie without traffic jam, trains, cutting chai, rains and atleast the Fiat cabs?
How can a sales office function without mobile phones? Which year are we talking about?
Why there’s nothing in the name of office security?
Not probing deep, I think the writing should have been little more convincing and less fairy tale like.
Finally, the dialogues were more like Abbas-Mastan type, stressing on cheesy one-liners and weird analogies.
‘Risk to Spiderman ko bhi lena pdta hai, hum to salesman hai’, is it good enough to be used so many times in the movie?
The title song pocket mein Rocket was absent in the movie, which was another disappointment for me.
However, there are many more laugh out loud moments, pleasant detailing and well crafted sequences to enjoy, than nitpicking on negatives. Rocket Singh definitely rocks and sings better than the consistently inferior celluloid nautanki, we get to see otherwise.
So, thumbs up to Rocket Sales Corporation and its partners and middle finger to big guys of the industry.
Tags: Gauhar Khan, Jaideep Sahni, Mukesh Bhatt, mumbai, Nitin Rathore, Prem Chopra, Raghav Lawrence, Ranbir Kapoor, Rocket Singh, Rocket Singh Salesman of the Year, Shazahn Padamsee, Shimit Amin
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Rahul Dholakia
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Varma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Sachin Kundalkar
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Sorry to nitpick but Giri the I.T Geek is not played by Raghava Lawrence, but its by ” our own”
D.Santosh- check this out
http://passionforcinema.com/author/santosh/
Also the boss- Puri is not played by Shanthanoo Bhagyaraj, but its played by Manish Chaudhary.
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ooops !
Thanks, I will correct the mistakes on my blog. Thanks Sethu.
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Nice to see ya in action, after a long time, and a fairly good review. If u have not seen GGGR( Glen Garry Glenn Ross), do check it out ASAP, very rarely u get to see an ensemble cast of Alec Baldwin, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey, Jack Lemmon at their best.
I had written on PFC about this movie.
http://passionforcinema.com/third-prize-you-are-fired/
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Although everyone in GGG is perfect, Jack Lemmon and Alec Baldwin, in that order, simply swallow the other actors with their performances. Jack Lemmon is simply incomparable in the film. Outstanding depiction.
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Most of the questions you raise are not very important…or maybe I feel that way since i don’t live in Mumbai…
Plus another wonderful corporate movie to be mentioned is Kalyug. Namakharam also deserves a mention. I agree, Corporate was crap like most of Bhandarkar’s movies…
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Did you say ‘Corporate was crap like most of Bhandarkar’s movies…’? *gape*
Where are your feet?
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I think Delhi would have been a better setting because Gurugoan or Nodia probably has bunch of these type of characters.
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WOW..wonderful analysis..thats why,i feel ur reviews (or should i say analysis) are far better than khaleed saab.This is how it should be written!!..keep rocking buddy!!
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Even I was thinking it was happily Delhi and later to come out of that when I saw the ‘MH’ registration on his Scooty.
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You know Yashraj is playing safe when the lusty admin nightbird in the office is zapping pictures of semi-naked girls on his comp when he can take the liberty of denuding them further or when the receptionist does not use sex as a ladder to climb the professional ladder (Kangna did so unapologetically in Life In A Metro). Leave the dark side to the noir inspired directors shooting from the fringes. Shimit Amin plays by the Yashraj rulebook and keeps it simple in Rocket Singh- Salesman of the Year, save a few guesstimates to keep the dramaturgy from turning into a boardroom snorefest.
The film then, opens with a get-together at a house, where the gauche Harpreet Singh Bedi (Ranbir Kapoor) – in a horizontally striped tee, sporting a thick facial fuzz, a kada – his turbaned Sardar look, celebrates the end of years of mind-numbing academia by breaking into an impromptu jig – jutting his protuberant tush exuberantly, hands swinging up in the air, proclaiming what he will do in life –as he spells out S-A-L-E-S. The rest of the film follows his road taken – which isn’t a bed of roses as he learns ‘on the job’. His only talent is his righteousness, which grows stronger and more resilient with the lessons he learns from his nasty encounters at AYS – a computer selling company where he starts off as a salesman. His boss Purie (Manish Chaudhary) is a monster and his supervisor (played by a quirky Naveen Kaushik who has long tapering sidelocks curving at his jaw for the horns missing on his head) is no less cunning. Receptionist Koena (Gaurhar Khan in a garish debut) is the hard-as-nails backbone of the office space, even as the tea-serving peon Chhotelal Mishra (Mukesh Bhatt) is nursing ambitions to be referred to more than just ‘aye cup plate’. The hardware engineer dude (D Santosh) from Hyderabad becomes Harpreet’s first confidante in the run up to Rocket Singh Corp – a firm Harpreet stealthily runs from the confines of AYS.
As with every sales interview where an inanimate object is tossed at a candidate who is then asked to sell it, Harpreet in his very first interview with the sales manager of AYS, is asked to pitch for a rubber-less pencil. When he is almost losing his chance with his nervous pitch, just then, like a deus ex machina, owner of AYS – watching him from afar decides to give him a chance at the job, despite his poor academic qualifications. It is this kind of unexpected beginning which gives Harpreet groundwork to build on. At every target, he is met with the same sort of uncertainty that might stall his career growth but he waddles through it with the conviction of a talent he has yet not acquired, but you realise, he will successfully do by the end of the film.
Every character in the film leads an insular life – cut off from family, friends and tied to their jobs, in shackles. This gritty truth, addled with the cutting humour of the film does not allow the film to lose its locus standi but the characters become puppets to the system that has consumed them and is running only on their steam. While the writing can be over-wrought in places and becomes over-bearing, you begin to thank Yashraj for not using their sing-song tropes for relief. You plod along with the bunch of office clerks, because you connect. Like in Chak De India, when Shimit assembled players from across India to unite the film-going masses, he does use that one ace up his sleeves in Rocket Singh. Notice how he has used the cliches – the joker Sardar, the ‘item girl’ receptionist, the bhaiyya peon, the crazed boss, a cold and calculative supervisor, the Hyderabadi ‘hardware-hardcore’ admin guy without a care in the world. These are people from all strata of society we connect to at some level through our offices.
The film is dearly shot, with the camera at times careening over daily spaces we invade as a hovercraft would, gently chiming overhead. The background score never threatens to take over the writing, dialogues are allowed to sock it. The casting is well-balanced, each character gets ample space to flesh out their sometimes tender, but mostly menacing parts. Shazahn Padamsee makes an unremarkable debut, and could have been done without, but I guess she was there to say that chirpy girls can be attracted to joker Sardars – perhaps to give vent to the thought that under every hirsute and turbaned guy is a rockstar in denial. In her one scene with Gauhar, you can tell who has worked very hard to get the part, and whose lap the role fell in, due credit to progeny.
Shimit Amin, when describing how he treated Ranbir Kapoor on the sets of the film said, he didn’t have to teach him a thing. Ranbir came thoroughly prepared and it shows on-screen. How difficult must it have been to shoot with a barely recognisable leading man on the streets of Mumbai? I’d say, very easy, Ranbir becomes the character, not an actor impersonating the written part imagined. He is a Raj Kapoor tramp of our modern times; playing his many parts this year (Wake Up Sid, Ajab Prem…) with the same elfin charm Raj Kapoor rubbed on his many characters back in the golden era.
After Chak De, the writer-director team of Jaideep Sahni- Shimit Amin, prove once again that a good script in a good hand makes for one of the most rewarding films of the year. My only complaint with the film is, where was the water-cooler title track in the film? It was sorely missed! Shimit should now make a film where people get down and dirty not in a boardroom, not on a sports field, but in the bedroom please. His films are devoid of love-romance-sex. Or is this the only reason why Yashraj backs his projects, so that they can offer this unsweetened lollipop from their candy store? Am sold!
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Manish- It was fairly long and elaborate to be termed as a comment. you could have easily posted it as a separate review.
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Regarding the questions you have raised : Have a couple of counters …
Which part of Mumbai were Harpreet staying?
In KKG it was important coz it was a movie about real estate.
Here how does it matter ?
Why is Harpreet Singh staying with his grandpa? Why there’s no mention of his parents, even once?
No answer but let me put a counter question … how many would have liked a lengthy flashback on how his parents died in a film of this tone?
How did Harpreet afford to drink in plush lunge bars with his friends?
The first time he does , clearly he pays the bill coz he has just started the Rocket Sales Corp and i assume has made money. Other scenes of him partying are house parties of his richie legal friend. The scene where they eat when he has just lost Rocket Sales is a scene where he is depressed. Possibly he was taken out by his friends !!!
What business was Sherena and her partner into?
Whats the relevance ? How would it have made the film tighter ?
How can you make a convincing Mumbai movie without traffic jam, trains, cutting chai, rains and atleast the Fiat cabs?
The movie is about a sales man … its not about Mumbai … Bluffmaster / Life in a Metro / Wake up Sid had Mumbai as a character almost … this film does not.
How can a sales office function without mobile phones? Which year are we talking about?
Every sales guy had mobile phone. However when inside office of any sales org , most people would be talking on office phones. Given the fact that AYS is glorified assembler , their ads in paper would have probably just printed their board number. And then it was upto Gauhar to divide the leads (and steal some for Ranbir) … very logical … walk into sales offices of most Indian PC makers and offices of large channel partners of MNC makers … the use of landline phone would be much more than mobiles. To give another example , 2 really large MNC IT orgs till recently (less than 2 years back) had a policy preventing mobile phone numbers to be printed on visiting cards.
Why there’s nothing in the name of office security?
How do you know there is nothing ? Once you are an employee of any mid sized Indian salesy firm , you can walk into your office anytime. Its only the paranoid MNCs that have elaborate security arrangements.
The reason i answered these queries with my opinion was that I am not convinced how any of the details would have helped the movie.
That does not at all mean that i am implying the film does not have flaws …
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Hi Prasun,
Thanks for reading, thinking and taking time to answer the questions.
I thought the questions were pertinent as, I didn’t find the finer detailing and logistics convincing enough to believe the pretext is Mumbai. Of course, I have assumed that the city itself is a character in the film, because it had quite a lot of outdoor scenes.
You rightly compared with Wake Up Sid and got the point there. There was not a single detail in Rocket Singh movie which talks about Mumbai.
I am not sure how familiar you are with Mumbai life, because it is primarily dictated by the distance one stays from his workplace- be it a life of salesman or spiderman.
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Hi,
I started my career selling PCs in Mumbai for 2 years living in Andheri with office in Vile Parle but a fixed set of customers which were primarily large BFSI orgs. So home to office was on bike … followed by slow local to Andheri to Churchgate (the ones that started from Andheri to ensure a peaceful 40 mins sleep) and then customer calls in Nariman Point / Cuffe Parade. and then return in the evening by Andheri slow locals again for the convenience of a nice sleep. (Phone calls disturbing sleep from bosses were always unanswered with the crowded local train excuse).
Its only when the customers started moving to BKC that my customer calls happened on my TVS Victor bike. Painful customers were in Belapur / Vashi belt.
So yes , i do understand the locality aspect and it becomes all the more critical given the fact that AYS was selling to SMB organisations and their sales force was given territories. However that angle was not developed in the sense that there was only one dialogue where Ranbir says that its a residential area and has no offices. But that angle was not really relevant to the film which focussed on Ranbirs journey. Whether adding an element of struggle before the whole complaint episode would have helped is well debatable. For all you know if the script had developed in a way that Ranbir was losing orders and was getting screwed in office even before his ethical mistake, it may have brought more sympathy possibly.
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