Netflix's CAT shows us yet again Randeep Hooda is grossly underrated

I don’t know how Randeep Hooda has stayed away from the top. He had everything that it takes to be a major star. And yet the bigtime eluded him. CAT , Netflix’s first series in Punjabi, features him in his career-best performance as a protective brother trying to shield his sibling from the cancerous spread of drugs across Punjab. This is no Udta Punjab, and I mean that in a positive way. CAT has a rhythm of its own. It is heart-numbing in its mood of unalloyed darkness. The statistics on drugs intake in Punjab are sobering, to say the least. To seek any rays of sunshine in this circle of gloom would be unrealistic. Directors Rupinder Chahal, Balvinder Singh Janjua and Jimmy Singh are invested in telling a true-crime story. They want us to plunge into the vortex of this violent saga of a sanguinary state where guns go off faster and more unpredictably than at the battlefield. A battle is how CATS looks at the war against drugs.I don’t want to give away anything in the plot. Suffice it to say that Randeep Hooda plays a desperate man trapped in a dual role of police informer and the drug mafia’s trusted sidekick whose growing stronghold over his politician boss Aulakh(played with a masculine sense of space by Geeta Aggarwal) begins to trouble both the sides. The killings are relentless. The bloodbaths give no closure to the internecine wars for drug overlordship. The gangs are seen as victims rather than perpetrators. Hooda’s Gurnaam Singh, alias Gary, is a bit of a freelance infiltrator. He takes off on his own for days leaving his sibling behind to get deeper into drugs(shades of Tabbar here). And yet all attempts to win the trust of the drug mafia has its roots in sibling affinity. In the bid to protect his kid-brother (and a sister whom we hardly ever see) Gurnaam sinks deeper and deeper into the morass of drug-peddling. Randeep Hooda lives and breaths every minute of Gurnaam Singh’s wretchedly compromised life. As his loyalties get ripped apart in various directions,Hooda’s Gurnaam becomes a force of Nature: unstoppable, brutally forceful and determined to harness the winds under his sails as the storms gather in a dusky swirl of destruction. Although sprawling into eight episodes CAT never becomes tedious to watch. A large chunk of the plot takes us to Gurnaam’s teens in Punjab when militancy threatened to rip the State apart just as the drug-peddling business now threatens to destroy Punjab’s economy. Nothing and no one can be trusted in CAT. No one and nothing is as it seems. The brutality of the system that fosters hardcore criminals is ferreted out of the simmering cauldron of Punjab’s politics. Brothers kill their own brothers,a cop with a conscience(Hasleen Kaur) finds herself divided in her loyalty towards those in her own department who are peddling lawlessness, and those who are doing the same without the armour of khaki. There are cops here who are more sinister in their designs than the drug peddlers. Morality may go fly a kite. CAT tells us ,the more we seek to find a moral centre to the world of crime the less the chances of getting anywhere close to a resolution to the moral dilemma. Randeep Hooda’s Gurnaam never smiles. He knows more than the others that there is only way out of the drug mess: death. As in the recent Tanaav where Kashmiri actors participated in the drama of Kashmiri militancy, in CAT too Punjabi/Sikh actors bring to bear an arching authenticity to the procedure which makes us overlook some of the series’glaring aberrations, like crude sex scenes. I know these characters lack subtlety. But do the designers of the series have to follow suit?

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.