Tikli and Laxmi Bomb: Of overthrowing a system, and feminist sex workers

In our upwardly mobile urban society, we would want to believe, in this day and age, that hell truly hath no fury than a woman scorned, mocked and whose dignity is at stake, particularly in public.

She has the choice to make light of the situation - use her presence of mind and her sense of humor to shrug off the situation nonchalantly. She has the choice to get ruffled. She has the choice to keep a stern face. She has the choice to burst into tears. She has the right to blow the whistle. And most importantly, she has the right to be safe, be dignified and keep or blow up her earnings. Or better, blow up her husband's money too.

But, hey wait. What if she were to be, what we call, a hooker, a woman on the fringes of respectable genteel society?  What happens to her then? Will this "man's world" accord her the same privilege?

For all of this and many more reasons, "Tikli and Laxmi Bomb" is an important film - for the uniqueness of plot, the lack of facades, the realness in the way the lives of sex workers is depicted. And most importantly, for the sheer lack of martyrdom or moral high ground that is otherwise so important for formula cinema. This plot is not a quintessential preachy tale of "the road to becoming respectable" ; it is a calculated journey of overthrowing a deep-seated patriarchal arrangement that purports to protect sex workers, but which ends up relentlessly exploiting them. This is a story of two gutsy women who take on the tide, and how they systematically plan their way out of the "system", to create one of their own, and quite successfully at that. But, how easy or tough is the journey to this kind of freedom?

Aditya Kriplani, the maker of the film, surely knew he had a winner on hand. This movie, based on his own 2015 novel, rides on all new age disruptive thinking right from the story to the cast, to the way it has been funded and marketed - every single aspect challenges conventionally accepted models. Currently showing on Netflix, the movie is suddenly grabbing cine-goer eyeballs.

The plot gets a little lethargic in between, picks up pace again.  The ending could have been orchestrated way better - it was a bit cliched and rushed.
Nevertheless, Chitragandha Chakraborty (as Tikli) and Vibhavari Deshpande (as the older Lakshmi) live their roles well - this is a gritty dark film, reminiscent of the noir genre, but with a firm thread of humor running across the seediness. The women here are not teary eyed losers - they are wise girls who court the rough ride to real, raw danger every night of their professional lives, since there is a masochist male world out there that believes they are even less than objects. From there, at rock bottom, the path to safety and dignity seems impossible to the ordinary girl of the town - but, not to this select band of Mumbai women, who do not shy away from hatching their plots - beat the system by using the tricks of the very same system - find an alternative person whose palms can be greased, override a local authority and directly approach the higher authority with a carrot of more bribes et al. They even use GPS technology to track a sister in trouble. Smart, eh?

A must watch film - and thank god for recent cinema - we can escape the horrors of unreal tele-soaps, the ones our mothers are interminably hooked to, for what they claim, the want of viable options. I suspect, what our poor mothers lack are not options, but the nerve to confront and watch something this real, ripped off any sweet masquerade. So, while the world of tele flourishes, we feed on alternative media for newer, bolder stories waiting to be told. Tikli and Lakshmi Bomb is certainly one of those.