Tumse Na Ho Payega: A Badly Told Start-Up Story

THERE is only one thing worse than a start-up story — it is a start-up story badly told. The pervading hustle culture has lent an annoyance to the narrative of someone being successful by starting something on their own. It has also lent them a personality. If you scroll through Twitter, you will find countless accounts of 30-something people (mostly men) speaking only in threads, leaving no opportunity to remind the rest that they work for 30-hours a day, and dishing out their company’s gross earnings as both a retort and a reply. There is a bot-like energy to these start-up owners, a manic patriotism like they will break into Vande Mataram if you ask them non-aggressive questions like what are their hobbies. Abhishek Sinha’s Tumse Na Ho Payega not just embodies this spirit but embodies it so much that it broke my spirit.

Sinha’s film is based on Varun Agarwal’s How I Braved Anu Aunty and Co-Founded a Million Dollar Company, the 2012 novel which chronicled the way Agarwal and his school friend Rohan Malhotra started their entrepreneurial journey with Alma Mater, a start-up which monetised nostalgia by customising memorabilia for schools and colleges alumni across India (although it has now branched out to a more generic layout). In his adaptation, the director changes the calling. Alma Mater becomes Mom’s Magic and customisation of inanimate objects is replaced with two men profiting from delivering home cooked food to working professionals. Because if there is anything cheaper than nostalgia it is women’s labour.

To put it broadly and specifically, nothing works for the film: not the actors — Ishwak Singh is a painfully limited performer and as Gaurav, the protagonist prone to using expletives, he comes across as someone who is always on the gunpoint to emote; not the intent or the story. Everything is reduced to such painful simplicity that a certain someone called Harpreet Singh Bedi (also known as Rocket Singh) might be shedding tears close by.

Gaurav, Arjun and Vaghela are three childhood friends. Growing up, they were content with their 75 percent. Nothing much changed when they grew up. They continued aspiring for less but job dissatisfaction took precedence over mediocrity. One day Gaurav (Singh, who keeps breaking the wall to convey his feelings) gets fired. After sulking for some time, he comes up with a start-up idea of delivering tiffins of home cooked meals from women in and around his locality to working professionals.

Let me pause here for a bit and admire the charming innocence of three male writers (Nitesh Tiwari, Nikhil Mehrotra, Agarwal) of coming up with such a premise and going forth with it. Before you jump at me with “so what?” let me just say in no Hindi film in recent time has the male gaze been so nauseatingly apparent. Their perception of cooking, women cooking, and measuring it in terms of money is so sanitised that it almost comes across as tone-deaf. When Gaurav asks his mother (Amala Akkineni in an instance of random casting) how the food cooked by mothers is so tasty, pat comes the reply: it is made with love. When he decides to go ahead with the plan, neither the director nor the writers take a minute to work out the finances. How are women, who are depicted as homemakers, affording to buy the resources? What are they being paid in terms of their labour? There is plenty of discussion of their turnover (classic Twitter behaviour) and not one moment of clarity on how much the women earned from it. As if the idea of women making money from cooking is sacrilegious to the male makers of the film. We see one stray scene of one of them receiving payment but the insinuation is that they are doing it out of free will because what else do women love?

The gaze is a persistent problem not just in the way it looks at women but also at class structures. In a classic Rocket Singh move, a tea stall owner agrees to invest in Mom’s Magic. As the company goes through a hard time, he loses money. But of course since he is impoverished, he is supposed to have a heart of gold. He cannot afford being angry. Thus, when he is told that his money cannot be returned, which the man had saved for his children, he placates Gaurav and Arjun saying nothing is the matter. Later, when the successful entrepreneurs hand him a cheque, the gesture becomes that of charity.

There is also the problem of narrative arcs: there are none. Problems and solutions come hand-in-hand. No subplot is allowed to breathe and characters are forgotten like they do not exist. Gaurav fights with his mother to pursue his entrepreneurial journey and then for multiple scenes, she is kept out of the frame. We do not know how they reconcile which is ironic because he is literally making money from a company which has the word ‘mom’ in it.

Somewhere deep, deep down there is a story about measuring success not in the way society tells us to do. There is a cautionary tale of not doing things for the sake of only money. There is a funny rebuttal to the “Anu aunty” who goads us to follow the beaten path. She is an ungendered concept, much like cooking. But the film does not understand these nuances, and by doing so Tumse Na Ho Payega does only one thing well — living up to its title.

Stream here. 

(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of OTTplay. The author is solely responsible for any claims arising out of the content of this column.)