First time in bollywood,a film without a lead lady, carried wonderfully by 3 men.

There’s a moment in Abhishek Kapoor‘s ‘Kai Po Che’ when it’s two leading men Ishaan and Omi, delirious with joy at India winning a Test match they had given up for dead, rush towards each other and stop for a fraction of a second to gauge if a hug would be appropriate after their massive quarrel.

There are many moments of pure male bonding – refreshingly subtle – in ‘Kai Po Che ‘ that pull their weight in gold. There is the lovely Amrita Puri of course who romances one of the three, but her track doesn’t take the attention away from the film’s main selling point – the beautifully complex and boringly normal relationship between the three men.

They are that and more, often lovingly shielding each other from blows that life rain on them, without once letting the audience feel the absence of a major female star and leaving many wet eyes in the end. The last time I saw this kind of brotherhood in mainstream Bollywood was in Dil Chahta Hai, a slick coming-of-age story where the three friends complete each others sentence.

Actually no woman can substitute for the camaraderie that these three share. They hug, repeatedly, and cry unashamedly. They lock up their shop and rush to stand behind a friend who’s lost his parents during the fire in the Sabarmati Express.

While watching the film I realized how smart it was of Kapoor to not alter the narration in the source material – Chetan Bhagat’s ‘The 3 Mistakes of My Life’ – and give in to the temptation of introducing female leads to cater to a mainstream audience. How distracting that would have been