Oye Dilli!

The Great Delhi Film is elusive, but Oye Lucky! comes close.

Delhi loyalists who follow contemporary Indian writing often complain about the absence of a Great Delhi Novel — a book to rank alongside the many impressive tomes that have been written about Mumbai. But the Great Delhi Film has been even more elusive. Mumbaikars have access to hundreds of movies that have recorded the development of their city’s best-known vistas over decades — adding up to a historical document in the form of moving pictures — but we Delhiites must make do with blink-and-miss glimpses of our past.

Watching Sai Paranjpe’s Sparsh recently, I caught myself rewinding a scene to try and figure out if the Shabana Azmi character lived somewhere near Golf Links. And that shaded lane in the background, along which a solitary Fiat was zipping like a race-car...could that possibly be the 1980 avatar of Lodi Road?

Dibakar Banerjee’s delightful Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! is a Delhi movie that doesn’t linger on the city’s physical landmarks but captures many vital aspects of its mood and character. At a basic level, this film is about the improbably charmed life of Lucky Singh, a Sikh lad from a middle-class household in West Delhi, who grows up to become a master thief and gets away with audacious thefts — often doing nothing more strenuous than sauntering into a house and sauntering out again with a TV set tucked under his arm.

All this makes for a lightheartedly amoral story, anchored by a superb Punjabi-rap soundtrack, but Oye Lucky! is also a film that understands the dangerously spiralling nature of class aspiration. It knows a thing or two about surviving in a dog-eat-dog world where the kindly, “God-fearing family man” who befriends you and encourages his little son to call you “maama” might well have a dagger ready to plunge into your back.

Consequently, even its most flip scenes have undercurrents that are threatening or poignant, or both; this tone is set by an early scene where the young Lucky and his pals gape at the body of a friend who was killed by local hoodlums, and offhandedly remark that they too could end up with cotton in their nostrils.

At times, this movie feels like a more cheery cinematic cousin of Aravind Adiga’s book The White Tiger, about a lower-class man deciding to take his destiny into his own hands; the scene where Lucky and his friend Bangali buy “classy” (or gaudy, take your pick) clothes to gain access to a hotel discotheque mirrors the White Tiger passage where the driver-protagonist gets to see the inside of a Gurgaon mall. And the line “Yeh gentry log angrezi bolte hain par karte hain desi” sums up the behaviour of the vulgar upper-middle class whom Lucky simultaneously mocks and aspires to be like.

I’m not sure whether Oye Lucky! is, properly speaking, a Delhi film or a West Delhi film or even a Punjabi Bagh film (“Tilak Nagar se Rajouri ka chakkar lagaa doonga,” yells Lucky’s irate father at one point, and those colonies are the movie’s frames of reference), but it almost doesn’t matter. With its marvellous pen portraits of different character types and its pitch-perfect dialogue — spoken with just the right inflexions — it depicts Delhi’s Punjabi sub-culture and the status-hankering of the middle-class like no other film I’ve seen. Anyone who’s lived here for any length of time will find something to relate to.