Rajaram is a decent, shy clerk who lives in a crowded Bombay chawl and quietly adores his neighbour Sandhya, without ever finding the nerve to tell her. Then his childhood friend Bashu arrives needing a place to stay: charming, glib and utterly unreliable, he has the whole chawl, and Sandhya, eating out of his hand in no time, while Rajaram watches. Sai Paranjpye builds the story as a modern version of the fable of the hare and the tortoise, with Naseeruddin Shah as the tortoise and Farooq Shaikh, cast against his usual nice-guy image, as the hare. Gentle, funny and closely observed, with a lovely sense of chawl life and its nosy, warm community, it is one of the gems of 1980s middle-of-the-road Hindi cinema.
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