While attending his brother's engagement ceremony, KapilВ gets an anonymous tip-off about his wife cheating on him. The film follows Deepak Dobriyal's Kapil Agarwal, an insecure, underconfident man living in constant fear of being abandoned by his far prettier wife (Isha Talwar). On the other hand, Smrutika Panigrahi's SwaahaВ is treated as an intriguing cat-and-mouse chase, where the husband and wifeВ struggle to gain one-upmanshipВ over each other to have the last word. The story and its life-affirming ending aside, what makes Nano So PhobiaВ perhaps the most remarkable short of the lot isВ its sharp editing (masterfully done by Dnyanada Samarth) and Daniel B George's booming operatic background score. That she is a scatterbrain is established in the very beginning as she rummages through her drawers to look for her cellphone. She routinely has nightmares her former vertically challenged help Rancho (Arun Kushwah) will break into her house.В Her fear of vertically-challenged men, instilled by her dwarf domestic help, finds expression in her obsessionВ with vertically challenged television villains. Sain turns the home invasion genre on his head with aВ relentlessly wacky narrative, andВ a supposedlyВ senile septuagenarian (Swaroop Sampat) at the centre. In fact, Nano So PhobiaВ is so good that it may be even come to define what a model short film should look like. With Nano So Phobia,В director Rakesh SainВ poses a commentary on society and its apathy, but without a pinch of sermonising. While one tells the tale of an old, disheveled woman fighting to cope with the trauma of being robbed by her domestic help, the other captures the plight of a man who has just been informed that his wife has been an infidel. Talking about Bollywood, the most un-mainstreamВ ventures in the anthology are the deliciously zany Nano So PhobiaВ and Swaaha,В bothВ laced with a wicked sense of humour. Despite the superb acting though, one may find Sleeping PartnerВ a tad too melodramatic and Bollywoodised, especially in the end. His gait, and the twitch is his eyebrow is as far from a quintessential antagonist can get - which makes KapoorВ so chilling. Divya, systemically raped and sexually abused by her husband for over two decades, feels emboldened when her husband'sВ colleagueВ Ravish (Jitin Gulati) assures her she 'deserves love.'Дutta imbuesВ her character with utmost vulnerability, and Kapoor nails his portrayal of an abusive husband, by making him a spectacularly ordinary man. Her husband (Sanjay Kapoor) addresses her as his 'sleeping partner,' and treats her as a subhuman. Trapped in a loveless marriage, Beena (Divya Dutta) hopes one day she will be recognised and respected for the woman she is.

Punarvasu Naik's directorial Sleeping PartnerВ is also about a woman's journey to emancipation. Even in her rebellion, it is Neena's dignified quietude that makes the ending so powerful and effective. But Kashyap's masterstroke to make Neena quiet and shy helps the filmВ from slipping into intense melodrama. Neena's only human interaction is with the help, who does not spare a moment to roll her eyes at Neena's dedication towards her family or belt out a saucy remark at her naivety. There is also a cheeky observer - the domestic help (played by the effervescent Srishti Shrivastava). Silently, she seeks refuge into the bountiful, bustling kitchen with itsВ clanking dishes, whistling kettles, and boiling pots. Her husband (Shishir Sharma) is never malicious but often fails to regard his wife as a thinking entity. The anthology begins with Tahira Kashyap Khurrana's short Pinni,В which she hasВ crafted with utmost delicateness.В This is a story about a neglected woman ( Neena Gupta), whose daughter and relatives call her only when they need her to courier them her special handcrafted pinnisВ (a type of sweet popular in Punjab). Firmly grounded in reality, these seven stories are connected by a shared feeling of optimism, celebration, and rumination. Guneet Monga has a penchant for telling slice-of-life films that tug hard at your heartstrings - be it the poignant Masaan, the hopeful The Lunchbox, or the incisive Oscar-winning documentary Period: End of a Sentence.В With Zindagi inShort,В Monga's maiden collaboration with Flipkart Video, sheВ has attempted to present seven separate stories about 'extraordinary situations in our ordinary lives,' as she describes herself.

Zindagi inshort review