Cast: Muzammil Ibrahim,Tulip Joshi,Anupam Kher,Gulshan Grover,Ashutosh Rana,Anupam Shyam,Vineet Kumar; Director:  Pooja Bhatt; Rating: ***Not every potential terrorist belongs to one particular community. Yes, it sounds like a brutally vulgar adage in this day and age of murderous rage.

The man who violates your privacy and right to expression, or the woman who uses the educational institution to propagate prostitution, are the true terrorists of our society. Look around you - terror stares and stalks you in so many garbs, in and out of the burqa. You cannot escape it in one form or another.

Terrorism is a religion of its own.

In “Dhokha”, writer Mahesh Bhatt brings the savagely rampant cult of terrorism into the precincts of the middleclass household. The portrait of a derelict soul looking for his lost domestic utopia in the rubble of a nasty bomb explosion, is stark real, dark and poignant.

You can’t miss the urgent and brutal honesty of Bhatt’s writing skills.

He weaves a pastiche of angst and heartbreak from the raw material of headlines. The end result is thought provoking, emotional and most important of all original.

In a week where we are subjected to two remakes of 1970s’ films, “Dhokha” with its renewable but non-derivative topicality washes away the sins of excessive inspiration that plagues present-day cinema in Hindi.

Pooja Bhatt directs the stark story with a keen sense of historicity overlapping lives that would like to go about the unfinished business of their day-to-day activities, if only destiny didn’t have other plans.

Presume for a minute that the woman who shares your life has a secret identity. One such inescapably poignant situation was created for Harisson Ford in Sidney Pollack’s “Random Hearts” where his dead wife turns out to have a secret life.

Could the man or woman you trust with your life be planting bombs in her head? As Hyderabad burns you wonder what thought processes go behind minds that plan the carnage of the innocence.

More than anything else “Dhokha” is a pungent and powerful product of our troubled times, told with a spirited and sustained energy that allows sound technicians to do their jobs with quiet authority.

At the centre of the excruciating jigsaw of trust and betrayal is the debutant Muzamil Ibrahim. Playing the tormented widower he exudes an aura of confident tragedy that belies his rawness as an actor.

The brawn never comes in the way of sensitive expressions of a cop whose loyalty and integrity are weighed against his personal loss. The newcomer carries the emotional scenes well on his sturdy shoulders.

And if you’re tired of seeing Anupam Kher doing comedy, here’s the actor getting back to his roots, putting in a powerhouse performance as a bereaved father battling ostracism by a society that never accepted him in the first place.

Suffused with a sense of imminent catastrophe and an aura of implosive tension applied to the explosive theme, “Dhokha” is a film that persuades you not-so-gently to think about the quality of lives that we live and a social order that thinks terrorism happens only to ‘them’.

Really, one hasn’t had a more jolting reality-check in a while.

Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Mohanlal, Ajay Devgan, Prashant Raj Sachdev, Nisha Kothari, Sushmita Sen, Sushant Singh, Rajpal Yadav, Gaurav Kapoor, Urmila Matondkar, Abhishek Bachchan; Director: RGV; Rating: *Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag tells the story of a certain Inspector Narsimha (Mohanlal) who takes on one of the dreaded underworld dons – Babban (Amitabh). Needless to say, he pays for it dearly and practically loses his entire family to Babban’s wrath.

Rendered helpless because his fingers have been chopped, Narsimha hires two conmen – Heero (Ajay Devgan) and Raj (Prashant Raj). Babban has also been eyeing the colony – Kaalinagar, a prime real estate land – which has been a home to fisherfolk (and Narsimha) for generations. The battle, in a way then, takes on a ’social cause’ to protect the rights and interests of the helpless people.

Narsimha’s only family is his widowed sister-in-law Durga Devi (Sushmita Sen), who runs a clinic in the locality. And of course, there is Ghungroo the local tomboy, who makes a living out of driving a rickshaw.

The plot pretty much sticks to Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay, bar the ending, which is full of blood and gore – trademark RGV style.

Sushmita Sen and Mohanlal are probably two of the few reasons why we stuck around till the very end. The onscreen chemistry between the two has been very sensitively explored. Sadly though there are very few scenes involving the two. Newcomer Prashant Raj, though pretty raw, does seem to display potential. Moreover, the attempt to take the story out of Ramgarh to Kaalinagar, though not well executed, has been laudable.

Frankly the list is quite endless. So here are few top grouses: The characterisation – of Heero and Raj especially – seems pretty flawed. In the initial reels they are made out to be naïve fools, which goes against their basic character sketch. Moreover the dubbing leaves a lot to be desired. You can actually see people saying Veeru instead of Heero and Gabbar instead of Babban. That apart, for someone like RGV whose films rely heavily on editing, Aag comes across as a half-hearted effort. Disconnected scenes, randomly cut dialogues tend to jar.

Finally, adaptations are fine – Maqbool and Omkara are brilliant examples of that. And indeed the attempt to remake/adapt a classic like Sholay may have been noble. But that does not discount the many flaws that have gone into telling the story an entire generation has grown up listening to.

DO NOT watch the film! And we aren’t even comparing it to the original here. A well-told story needs no comparison and a badly narrated one should not be compared.