Watch Kali-Katha, the 'prologue' to Anurag Kashyap's Ugly

Director Anurag Kashyap wants you to add another activity to your usual pre-film watching rituals. So, in addition to booking tickets, cursing the ticket prices and telling yourself not buy the overpriced nachos, before going to see Ugly, you must watch Kali-Katha on YouTube. Incidentally, Kashyap is not offering a treatise on Indian mythology. This katha is not about Kali the goddess, but Kali, the innocent bud of a child who is the starting point for all the drama in Ugly. Kashyap would like you to know how Kali was conceived, literally.

Ugly is about what happens to a group of people when a little girl named Kali disappears. Kali-Katha is a five-minute short which culminates with the director showing us how Kali was conceived. Was it meant to be a crash course in non-consensual birds and bees, Kashyap-style? Perhaps, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Kali-Katha opens with a troubled married couple. Rahul (Rahul Bhat) and Shalini are married and much to Rahul’s irritation, Shalini (Tejashwini Kolhapure) has eaten all the eggs. In Ugly, the two are separated and Shalini, who gets custody of their daughter, is married to another man. At the moment, however, she’s married to a belligerent and grouchy Rahul, whose acting career is going nowhere.

A mysterious guruji advises Rahul that his fortunes will change only if the couple has a child. Immediately Rahul is keen on having a child while Shalini flatly refuses. A man who appears to be a friend (but is actually a casting agent, as we learn in Ugly)  brainwashes Rahul. He convinces Rahul to put Shalini in her place and show her who’s boss. Rahul’s method of establishing himself as boss is by raping Shalini. The film ends with a black frame with the following line scribbled in red : “… and Kali was conceived.”

If we didn’t know Kali-Katha is a prologue to Ugly, we’d have thought this was the opening of a Vikram Bhatt horror film, complete with the dark frame-red fonts. No doubt Kali would turn out to be Bollywood version of Damien from The Omen and show up in the bedrooms of upwardly mobile young couples and scare the wife in the middle of a make-out session. Or end up to be a chalky-faced child who will perch from cupboards and dangle her legs while clutching a teddy bear, leering at the hero combing his hair. You can’t be blamed for these Ram Gopal Verma-esque assumptions. Kali-Katha, from its name to its spooky background track, conjures up exactly such images in your head.

We’re not sure why Ugly needs a separate prologue to begin with? If Kashyap thought these five odd minutes were critical to understanding or appreciating Ugly, couldn’t he have included it in the film itself? What we are sure of, is that the prologue is not likely to go viral, given not many will even come to know of it. In the age of viral videos when the trailer of an obscure film gets thousands of views, the prologue released on 23 December,and has some 70 odd views in a day.

Here’s a better idea: watch the Ugly trailer again. But for those who are curious, watch Kali-Katha here: