OPM* - SHIVA (or) Shiva’s Regal Story (or) The Shivers

Last week, Objects in the Preview Mirror came out into the world with no warning or explanations. Like a blackhead or a Nadal 3rd round loss at the US Open.
This week, I intend to set the record straight and make the intent of this column even less clear.
Being an avid movie watcher I have gathered one very important fact. This is that people will continue to watch movies however unreal, miscast, boring, tepid or unimaginative the promos are. This column, hence, is dedicated to all those moviegoers who will continue to watch movies in spite of them being written about here.
Once in a while I aim to give you some small relief, hopefully comic, to fill in the time between driving, working and living in this city.

Today we will look at what Shiva, that releases tomorrow, could be about.


It all starts when Shirke is appointed Minister of Sport. Shirke is a lazy corrupt man who decides that gambling is a sport and ties up with Drug Dealers who want to invest money in casinos.

Meanwhile:
Shiva is an honest cop who pays for his chai and paan even though he doesn’t consume either. (Several people leave him cash for chai-paani)
His main grouse is against gamblers of all kinds. This is because all through his adolescence, his father, a tabla player, would lose at gambling and then practice his version of the teen mar on him (not the percussion rhythm, the practice of hitting teenagers)

Shiva gets an intelligence report from a stool pigeon in Shirke’s offices that Shirke has connections with Drug Dealers.

Shiva gets riled when he hears mention of Drug Dealers, because of his aversion to gambling and Dealers of all kinds.
Thus starts his war against the Dealer cartel. When he arrests 37 car dealers on basis of their visiting cards, he gets demoted.
His girlfriend, Nisha Kothari, a yellow journalist promises to put him in touch with someone who can help.

Enter Karriappan. Karriappan runs a Dvd piracy cartel. He has problems communicating with people because his entire vocabulary is in the language of Film. His driver never understands when he asks to rewind (reverse) the car and gets fined by the police twice for parallel parking.
In spite of these troubles, he runs a professional Dvd piracy outfit called
“Pirates of the Karriappan”. Being a bit of a pervert, all the women on his team have cards that say “Privates of the Karriappan”. This is his second favourite joke. (His favourite is – What is the difference between Mallika Sherawat and RGV? One has a lot to show, while the other has a lot to say.)
No one except Nisha Kothari has ever laughed at either of these and he is forever indebted to her. Nisha is actually a great actress who manages to convince Karriappan that she was laughing with and not at him.

Shiva meets Karriappan to discuss strategies to get at the Drug Dealers. Karriappan gives him box sets of Karan Johar movies that will compel the Dealers to fall in love amidst blossoms and sunflowers. He also tells Shiva that he could have a bright future as an actor and that he must prepare himself for an actor’s life. In the Interrogation Chamber Shiva starts focussing the lights on himself. This foxes all the criminals he interrogates and they confess to crimes they haven’t committed. Shiva thus solves 27% of the cases in Indian criminal courts in 14 days. This is a better record than any policeman in fiction and he gets rewarded with a trip to Brindavan Gardens.
All the Drug Dealers are there with bouquets in hand romancing Nisha Kothari who is now enjoying her work as a fulltime stool pigeon, instead of churning out crap for yellow journals.
Shiva rounds up the drug dealers and they confess that though they have been shirking work at the casinos because of the box sets they received, this is actually a good thing. They give him evidence against Minister Shirke, who has also been shirking work, which, in his case, is not a good thing.

Shirke is jailed. The Drug Dealers become Drug Lords when they get knighted for no reason, thus ending Shiva’s war with them. Nisha Kothari falls off a stool and gets fired because as a stool pigeon one really has to stay on the stool. She joins Karriappan’s team and he hands her a card that reads “Privates of the Karriappan”.



* Objects in the Preview Mirror may appear sillier than they are.

Disclaimer: Characters in the above story are not based on any characters in the film. Any resemblance or humour is pure luck.