<img style="float: left;" src="http://images.mid-day.com/images/images/2025/may/Mayank-Shekhar-op_e.jpg" alt="Mayank Shekhar" width="150" height="83" />Soon as Rahul daCunha&rsquo;s play, Pune Highway, premiered in Mumbai&rsquo;s in 2004, daCunha tells me, &lsquo;Bugs&rsquo; Bhargava Krishna, who was then acting in the production, had director Anurag Kashyap over to watch it.&nbsp;
Chiefly, to gauge if there was a film in it, to adapt. For which, there could only be two options.&nbsp;
One, you could continue with the play&rsquo;s motel-room setting. &ldquo;Like [Richard Linklater&rsquo;s] Tape,&rdquo; daCunha mentions one of my favourite films (ever).&nbsp;
Two, &ldquo;you could open it up to all the locations that the characters in the film talk about [in the room].&rdquo;
Nothing really came of the potential Krishna-Kashyap collaboration. 21 years hence, Krishna-daCunha have co-written, co-directed Pune Highway for the big screen, picking screenplay option two.
<img src="http://images.mid-day.com/images/images/2025/may/Rahul-da-Cunha-vf_e.jpg" alt="" width="1280" height="720" />
That is, the film opens with a dead-body floating in an Ozark-like lake. This is meant to be off Pune Highway. Guessing, this is before Pune-Expressway came up&mdash;bringing a racy, breezy, therapeutic touch to our Mumbai-Pune car-rides!&nbsp;
The said dead-body is anonymous. What the film follows then is the story of &lsquo;Famous Five&rsquo; type childhood, &lsquo;building friends&rsquo; (Jim Sarbh, Amit Sadh, Manjari Fadnnis, Anuvab Pal), and those around them. This is over their &ldquo;three timelines, aged 12, 25, and 40 [present-day].&rdquo;
Pune Highway is essentially a murder mystery, with the needle of suspicion swiftly shifting between multiple characters.&nbsp;
Albeit on the small screen, I&rsquo;ve watched this whodunnit twice. Not so much for the far too many of its characters &nbsp;as for how the loose ends of the thick, unpretentious plot get tied up, eventually.&nbsp;
The devil may be in the detail; the saint is surely in the structure.&nbsp;
I reckon it&rsquo;d be as pleasurable to hear a verbal narration of this script as to watch it; on screen, or stage. You could go so far as to say there&rsquo;s too much plot, as in story, for cinema as such; if that makes any sense. I enjoyed it more the second time on.&nbsp;
My sense is if Pune Highway, originally in English, had released circa 2004 &mdash; especially observing actors Sarbh, Pal, etc &mdash; it would&rsquo;ve been an English film, with a mix of other languages, for local authenticity.&nbsp;
Around 2000s, there was actually a sliver of cinema/multiplex window allowing for Indian-English indie entertainers as select/limited releases: starting with Hyderabad Blues (1998), Rockford (1999), Split Wide Open (1999), Monsoon Wedding (2001), down to Dance Like A Man (2004), Being Cyrus (2005), 15 Park Avenue (2005)&hellip;
Why, even from English, August (1994) to the supremely underrated Loins of Punjab Presents (2007)!
Actor Rahul Bose, who starred in several such films (even directed one: Everybody Says I&rsquo;m Fine!) explained to me once why this window got shut off.&nbsp;
He said Mumbai producers basically realised, if they simply switched language to Hindi, given the same English script, they could hugely widen the release. No other change to be made.&nbsp;
Just switch from English, which is also daCunha&rsquo;s &ldquo;first language&rdquo;&mdash; hence, Pune Highway had to be in Hindi, and that he finds quite perplexing.&nbsp;
Polymath daCunha, also a much-loved columnist with this paper, says, &ldquo;English plays have been thriving, for years; in fact, way better than Hindi stage &mdash; that&rsquo;s not even a scene, outside Prithvi and NCPA, unless you have stars in them [in Mumbai]!&rdquo;
Pune Highway is veteran theatre-maker daCunha&rsquo;s film debut. Yeah, agree; age&rsquo;s just a number (until your back hurts, I guess)! His filmmaking partner, also ad-man, Krishna, is 63. Pune Highway is his third feature, although his first theatrical release.
Subsequently, I speed-watched Krishna&rsquo;s other two films; likewise, murder-mysteries (on Zee5), Barot House (2019; starring Sadh, Fadnnis), and Nail Polish (2021; with Arjun Rampal, Manav Kaul).&nbsp;
Observing the genre, the fact of starting with a dead-body, and working the script backwards from it; looking at suave, suited lawyers; a character inevitably dealing with psychological issues, drawing from childhood trauma&hellip;&nbsp;
I tell daCunha, Pune Highway feels like the culmination of a trilogy. He laughs over the phone, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m gonna call Bugs, and tell him that!&rdquo;
He adds, &ldquo;But you&rsquo;re right &mdash; while I&rsquo;m obsessed with friendships, and the play came from my mind, with noir, elements of horror &mdash; it does seem as if it&rsquo;s marrying with the two other films [Krishna&rsquo;s] done! No question about it; third part of a trilogy!&rdquo;
daCunha is part of India&rsquo;s pop-culture history for the Amul hoarding campaign he&rsquo;s captained for over 30 years &mdash; displaying a new ad, often five times a week; sharply reflecting topical, trending topics from current affairs.&nbsp;
His Amul ads could simply parallel contemporary history in ways that books entertainingly can&rsquo;t.&nbsp;
Though I didn&rsquo;t tell him so, the first time I felt chuffed at being a journalist, in my early 20s, was when a story of mine (a moral-police principal, banning St Xavier&rsquo;s College prom) made it to his Amul hoarding! It denotes arrival of sorts.&nbsp;
The lines are top-class wordplays. It&rsquo;s the treasured trait of quality news/features as well, that online click baits can&rsquo;t replicate.&nbsp;
daCunha is that consistent advertising pun-dit; at it, over decades. I ask him what headline/copy might he place for his own film on an&nbsp;
Amul hoarding?&nbsp;
He says, &ldquo;Punny highway!&rdquo; That Pune Highway has a cinema hoarding, in these times, is no mean feat itself. Certainly, a dream come true, for daCunha, at 62.&nbsp;
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.&nbsp; He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com The views expressed in this column are the individual&rsquo;s and don&rsquo;t represent those of the paper.<script type="text/javascript">atOptions={'key':'d0ddb8ef8f1a62a8cdd22fac27fc5ea7','format':'iframe','height':90,'width':728,'params':{}};</script>
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What is it about Rahul daCunha’s minimalist murder-mystery, now playing at a movie theatre near you, that keeps viewers hooked to its meaty plot, throughout?

Pune highway via top ad pun-dit!

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Pune highway via top ad pun-dit!

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