Happy to pen this blog on the film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (hence forth we shall refer it to JBDY). This blogpiece is unlike any film review in the sense that we give a very small space to the actual film plot but we shall talk a lot about the making of this cult comedy. Part of the reference work done for this article includes the Harper Collins book Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro,Seriously Funny Since 1983-written by film journalist Jai Arjun Singh.

Kundan Shah took the lead in directing this low budget film (made at a cost of a little less than7 Lakhs!) at the behest of NFDC. NFDC those days stepped up as a patron to young filmmakers, it started off as a film finance corporation to infuse fresh breath into Indian cinematic visionaries and eventually it got renamed as NFDC (National Film Development Corporation) and  had delivered great low budget quality movies later on played on Doordarshan, the only home entertainment channel that we had then in the 80’s.

Many of the contributors to this classic piece of art are now ‘big names’ in the film fraternity, and some of them  left their earthly sojourn!. Kundan Shah himself passed away in 2007, Om Puri and Ravi Baswani also left us recently.

The other big names that I am talking about, Naseer (Naseeruddin Shah) was just awaiting to throw away his “serious actor” image, Vidhu Vinod Chopra now famous for the Munna Bhai series, PK and 3-Idiots was a production controller for JBDY, Neena Gupta (of Bhadaai Ho fame) plays a comic part, Satish Kaushik who is now a famous producer and director played one of his first comedy roles in this movie. Besides we have the versatile  Pankaj Kapur.

The film plot involves a satirical comedy to unearth a nexus between administrators and corporate bigwigs. Here is the plot in brief , it is a story of two upcoming photographers Vinod and Sudhir (played by Naseer and Ravi Baswan) who get a job (or a contract) of a 

News-magazine , to work on a scandalous story or rather dig some dirt exposing the dealings between an unscrupulous builder, Tarneja and the corrupt Muncipal commissioner D’Mello.They accidentally see Tarneja shooting someone. In their job of covering the story of Tarneja, they find a coffin containing dead body of Muncipal Commissioner D’Mello who according to common knowledge had died of a terminal illness. Now it is a suspicion that the person whom Tarneja shot was in reality the Muncipal Comissioner. They take several photographs of the dead person and confirm that it is indeed Mr D’Mello , and then they push the coffin into a hidden place. But later they find the coffin is missing from that place. Vinod and Sudhir find out that the body is with Tarneja's rival, Ahuja who had, in an inebriated condition, carried the coffin to his farmhouse. They somehow get the coffin but meanwhile Tarneja, Ahuja, the new Municipal Commissioner and several others also get involved resulting in a series of comic mix-ups.

This movie also is remembered for the musical rendition of the cult poem ‘Hum Honge Kaamyaab’...written by Girijakumar Mathur who translated from the English original - ‘We shall overcome’.

Reminiscing on the good old days of  its shooting most of the crew members of JBDY say that it was utterly chaotic many were left confused all the while as to what kind of a film it would turnout to be. The film had only Naseeruddin Shah as a known face although Ravi Baswani had one big release namely Chashme Buddoor. Ravi Baswani in fact won the Filmfare’s best comedian award for JBDY, while  Kundan Shah won the Indira Gandhi National award for the best debut as director. Most of the actors were Kundan’s friends from FTII with the  exception of Pankaj Kapur who was from NSD. Another trivia is that the names of the lead characters Vinod and Sudhir were those of the Production controlloer Vinod Chopra and the writer Sudhir Mishra. The movie did not see big success at the time of its first release but in subsequent releases it attained a cult status according to film critics.