Alia Bhatt’s Jigra: Uncovering essential money lessons amidst family drama

Vasan Bala who gave us the unforgettable Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota goes humongous budget with Dharma Productions’ Jigra. Alia Bhatt plays Satya, the problem solver for the family - carefully and emotionlessly she sends the poor girlfriend of the rich groom away to London to have his baby while he gets married to a chosen, rich bride - knowing that though ‘family’, she will always be the poor cousin herself. Her brother Ankur (Vedang Raina) whom she treasures, creates a financial software.

The family’s wild son Kabir and Ankur are sent to a foreign land to sell that software. Hanshi Dao seems like a land from Hong Kong movies of the nineties (remember Mahesh Bhatt’s Gumrah?). Well, just like it happens in movies, Kabir buys a small bag of cocaine and his rich dad’s lawyer gets Ankur to take the fall when the cops catch them. When Satya realises that Ankur has been framed and will lose his life, she sets out to rescue him from a high security prison.

If you can forgive every prison trope in every prison break movie, and the smart aleck ‘homage to movies’ references present in Jigra, there is a very important money lesson to learn.

Why you should be investing long term

In the movie young Satya tells her brother, ‘You tied rakhi to me, right? This means you are under my protection.’

Satya saves Ankur from bullies, prevents him from seeing their father kill himself, tries to protect him from Kabir’s very obvious bad company, sets the family patriarch’s office on fire when Ankur is falsely imprisoned, tries her best to get legal help in a land where drug possession equals death penalty, and when all efforts seem to fail, she embarks on a rescue mission that ends up in mayhem and chaos in the prison.

The only thing that seems to motivate her into rescuing her brother again and again since childhood is love. Logic and Hindi movies do not intersect. The brother is hardly some delicate darling that needs rescuing. He doesn’t come across as a fragile flower who has been sheltered in the hothouse. The only redeeming factor in his privileged life is that he has a sister who loves him. His cry of, ‘I’m an orphan!’ doesn’t work in that courtroom, and had there been a mother (any mother, let alone a Jewish one!) in the film, she would have used her footwear to knock sense into the brat.

But he’s like one of those uncles who invested early in a stock that turned out to be ‘blue chip’. His sister Satya. He respects her, and loves her. And that love multiplies, so much so that she rescues him from a scary prison. When you invest early in a stock that shows promise, you set that investment aside and watch it grow year after year. Just like Satya, the investment is your protection during the worst times in your life.

Satya is like the investment you have put away to ‘save you on a rainy day’. The protection that investment offers will help you become Ankur - trying out new ideas and investing in newer ventures - while you are protected. She becomes the insurance policy that you can cash, the nest egg that comes in handy when everything seems to go South.

The movie is as predictable as two plus two is four. You grin when the knife sharpening skills song from Zanjeer plays in the background as Satya plans the ‘rescue’. You wonder which movie inspired the scene where rebels stage an accident to stop and add stuff into fuel tanks. You cringe as you hear John Woo, Wong Kar-wai and Park Chan-wook are listed as prisoners and want to stab yourself at the needless cleverness of ‘Yaari hai imaan’ on the playlist as Manoj Pahwa drives his Madagascar van to rescue Satya and the three lads… Eight weeks later when the film shows up on Netflix, you will be glad they invested in a fast-forward button and use it to watch the mean jailor who eats up the screen in every scene!

Manisha Lakhe is a poet, film critic, traveller, founder of Caferati — an online writer’s forum, hosts Mumbai’s oldest open mic, and teaches advertising, films and communication. She can be reached on Twitter at @manishalakhe.