What Is That Accent, Shahid?

From what I gather the Toilet Ek Prem Katha director Shree Narayan Singh’s new film Batti Gul Meter Chalu is about power theft in themo fussil areas.

No, not politics. But the vandalizing of electricity. The inflated bills that put consumers into a shock. How the hell did that happen??? We scream and them cough up a small fortune. Nothing compared with the shock I felt on hearing Shahid Kapoor’s Garhwali accent. He’s a citizen of a sleepy town in Uttarakhand lit only by darkness.

I guess his spoken language is Garhwali, but it sounds more baharwali an outsider doing an awful imitation of the local accent.

Accents and especially those done badly are totally off-putting in our cinema. Like the power shutdowns in non-metropolitan cities, only a miracle can restore our faith in this film with its phony accents. Unless they decide to clean out Shahid’s spoken lines in the final dubbing. And while they are at it, they can also do something about Shraddha Kapoor who gets more annoying with faked enthusiasm in each film.

Except for Devyendu Sharma who plays Shahid’s best friend, no one seems to really belong to the region where this film is set. Least of all Yami Gautam who appears as a lawyer at the end of the trailer. Shahid Kapoor playing the defense lawyer (yes, he is a lawyer too besides an expert in Indian dialects) checks her out and makes a lewd comment about her figure

In the courtroom!

Order order! Please order some logic into what looks like a film on power theft gone hopelessly off-track.