Wednesday, October 13, 2021

Mumbai Saga: Why Bhau Killed Amartya Rao

 


Mumbai Saga is a brilliant movie made on the life of Mumbai’s big gangster named Amar Naik from the 1990s. If you watch this movie, its ending will look at bit puzzling.

Mumbai Saga is the story of rise of Amartya Rao (character based on late don Amar Rao) in Mumbai crime scene. The role is played by John Abraham who has done a great job. I think John’s acting has been always underrated while he has been giving one great performance after another. So, as per the plot, Amartya Rao is from a poor family who is forced to enter crime scene to protect his younger brother from other local goons. At that time, another big gangster was ruling the crime scene and there was a rising politician named Bhau (based on Balasaheb Thackeray) who noticed Amartya and promoted him so as to have his own muscle power.

Amartya rises in power but gets himself in soup after he murders a big industrialist in broad daylight in Mumbai. If he wanted it to create his terror in the minds of whole of Mumbai, he succeeded in that, but then Mumbai is too big for any single don or gang. Very soon, police starts chasing him and there is a particular police officer named Savarkar (role played by Imran Hasmi) who kills many of his close friends and even attacks Amartya at every opportunity. Bhau asks Amartya to go abroad for sometime in order to let the matter cool down, and asks him to let his younger brother run the gang in the meanwhile. But while Amartya is abroad, the policeman even attacks his younger brother and hence Amartya is forced to return back to take his injured brother to safety. At this moment, he gets to know that Savarkar is Bhau’s man and hence while he feels cheated by Bhau, he asks him to control Savarkar. Bhau is shown to have asked Savarkar to stop chasing Amartya, but right at the moment Amartya is to catch an airplane to take his brother out of India, Savarkar arrives and shoots him dead. It is shown that he had got the killing order and information about Amartya’s location from Bhau and another close aide of Amartya. Now the question comes that why did Bhau get Amartya killed when he was really a competent gangster and totally loyal to Bhau?

I tried to search for an answer but it is not logically explained anywhere. Then I thought about it and arrived at a logical reason which makes sense.

Bhau had helped Amartya rise in the crime scene and both benefitted from each other, but the moment he killed that big industrialist, Bhau got to know that Amartya was going “out of hand”. He had become too big and was no longer his puppet. Allowing him to gain more power would mean that he can be a threat to himself one day, in case the relationship sours, since both were very close and knew each other’s secrets. Hence he asked his man Savarkar to eliminate Amartya’s close aides and also him and his brother. Bhau planned to replace Amartya by someone more easily controllable as the leader of the gang.

Now, where did Amartya go wrong?

For the while everything was going fine, but the tricky moment was when Amartya came to know that Savarkar was Bhau’s man. Knowing that would mean that Savarkar can’t be after his life without Bhau’s permission and hence Amartya should have stopped trusting Bhau from that moment onward. In fact, he should have betrayed and killed Bhau too, if he wanted, since that is the rule of the mob. But, he still trusted Bhau for one last emotional thing: to take his injured younger brother to safety. Perhaps after keeping his brother to safety, he would have returned and then attacked or countered both Savarkar and Bhau. But, since he hesitated in taking an immediate step, Bhau got an upper hand and got him killed. Why should Bhau allow Amartya and his brother to escape, when he wanted them dead for so long? Amartya’s mistake was to trust Bhau even after knowing his real intention.

- Rahul Tiwary

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