‘Srikanth’ review: Insipid rendering of a fascinating life

 At my screening of Srikanth, the first three rows were taken up by children on a school trip. I won’t say they were rivetted throughout; there was a lot of squealing and shushing and bouncing in seats. Still, I think the kids got more out of the film and liked it a lot better than I did. I’m not trying to be flippant. So much of Hindi cinema is explaining complex stories in a way a 10-year-old would understand. 

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Tushar Hiranandani’s film is based on the real-life story of Srikanth Bolla, a visually challenged man from a village in Andhra Pradesh who became a successful entrepreneur. It’s a simplistic rendering of a remarkably determined journey, jumping from achievement to achievement while periodically lobbing moral instruction at the viewer. Srikanth, played by Rajkummar Rao, 39, is introduced as a bright high-schooler who causes a stir when he takes on the board of education over the sciences being unavailable to visually challenged students. This sets up a pattern: Srikanth is told he can’t do something because he’s blind and, through talent and sheer force of will, he goes out and does it.

The real Srikanth actually played on the national blind cricket team; he really was the first overseas blind student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hiranandani and writers Jagdeep Siddhu and Sumit Purohit might argue that, incredible as they may seem, these are the facts of Bolla’s life. Nevertheless, it is their responsibility to make remarkable events seem credible, and Srikanth never manages that. Everything has to be a record, a near-miracle. Every exam he gives, he tops. The first time he swings a baseball bat, he hits a home run. Where are the mistakes, the 10,000 hours?

Srikanth is helped by his teacher, Devika (a benevolent Jyothika), and later by Ravi (Sharad Kelkar), his partner in a recycled paper business. Sage advice is offered by Swathi (Alaya F), a girl who reaches out over Facebook, fascinated by his story, and by no less than President APJ Abdul Kalam. But it’s Srikanth who makes all the big plays, plowing ahead even as his sighted well-wishers advise caution. Strangely, about an hour and a half into the film, Srikanth does a heel turn of sorts. It’s a half-hearted passage, performed without conviction by Rao (who can be really nasty when he’s into it) and explained away with pop psychology. 

Rao’s eyebrows give a whole performance of their own—start noticing them and you’ll see nothing else. Srikanth is written as winsome and endlessly inspiring, a death sentence to an actor looking for something to create friction with. The cloying dialogue (“You don’t need sight to know right from wrong”) doesn’t help, or the ridiculously dramatic, Rohit Shetty-esque fanfare that plays whenever Srikanth has a breakthrough. 

Instead of showing us a visually impaired person’s life with clarity and honesty, the film keeps repeating that they shouldn’t have to be beggars. I’m sure the young minds at my screening absorbed that lesson, since it was offered at least a dozen times. “We only have sight, he has vision,” someone says of Srikanth. They could be talking about the film: wide-eyed, no vision.  

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