WAH TAJ! - An unnecessary film made on the script more apt for a satirical play. (Review By Bobby Sing)

One of the most famous hit comedy plays in Delhi theater circle happens to be TAJ MAHAL KA TENDER that is still played in various auditoriums around Delhi-NCR almost every six months on a regular basis. It’s a fictional satire assuming the Taj Mahal being made in a corrupt system and Shah Jehan calling in tenders for the same like a regular road or flyover. We first saw the play some two decades back and since then no one has ever tried to make it into a movie as it is perfect script for a satirical comedy play but certainly not for a full length feature film targeting the mainstream Hindi film viewers.

Probably the makers of WAH TAJ! didn’t know about this related ‘eye-opener’ fact associated with such specific subjects or scripts and thus decided to go for a commercial Hindi film on a related subject where a simple farmer of Maharashtra openly claims the land of Taj Mahal as his legal ancestral property gifted by the Mughal emperors.

The film comes to this major plot of the script within the first five minutes itself and therefore doesn’t allow the viewer to make any kind of relation with the characters hampering both the satire as well as the comedy quite severely. The fun element remains missing and the acts soon step into an absurd zone with all ridiculous courtroom scenes insulting both the court, the honourable judge (badly played by Rajeev Verma) and the press covering the case like some school kids. The absurdities go on increasing from here onwards and cross all limits of ‘acceptable imagination’ when a completely foolish and insane twist is revealed just before the tiring climax. 

As a performer though Shreyas Talpade makes a sincere effort in a badly written role, but with all cartoonish kind of silly supporting characters around, even he begins looking like the same after a few good comical moments in the beginning. Besides neither the songs, nor any technical aspect of the film works during its entire duration of around two hours.

To be honest its quite possible debutant director Ajit Sinha had all noble intentions to reveal the present corrupt system through the satire, excited by the script on paper. But on screen, it exactly looks the opposite as some kind of brainless, illogical comedy/satire executed amateurishly.

In specific words, some really interesting ideas can only be best portrayed as a play with the allowed liberties and set-up, but you cannot go on making a mainstream Hindi film on the same, where we have a completely different kind of audience and contrasting expectations.

Rating : 0.5 / 5