The series too fails to make it from ‘Kanneda’ to ‘Canada’. It endeavours to bring alive the anti-social adventures of a Punjabi rapper in Vancouver. But somehow, it never gets beyond the superficial tropes: the angry rapper Nimma (played with sufficient bile by Parmish Varma), the rapper’s cool-headed friend Daljeet (Aadar Malik), Daljee3*t’s sister/Nimma’s love interest Harleen (Jasmin Bajwa, a sparkling discovery).
The three main characters are silhouetted awkwardly against a drug cartel, with Arunoday Singh trying his utmost to look menacing and sinister, and failing on both counts, through no fault of his.
The writing is so adamant on being cartoonish that the actors have no choice but to follow suit. Even an irreproachable actor like Mohd Zeeshan Ayub is rendered reproachable by a script that thinks with its elbow muscles, writing not what the characters think or do, but what the audience would like them to.
Sincere moments are hard to find; action with some impact is scarce. The brown cast is hazy; the white actors are wobbly. Nimma (normal) raps his way through episode after episode of overwritten mayhem.
There is very little here that we haven’t seen, and what we do get to see is filled with a prevailing tackiness. Nimma’s parents, for example, are the stereotypical hand-wrenching, lip-biting Sardarji and Sardarni wondering why their puttar has chosen the crime beat. Maa butters parathas, while puttar peddles (never snorts) cocaine.
There are the GOOD traffickers, and the bad. And the twain shall never meet anywhere except in badly written crime dramas.
In all honesty, there is little struggle, abundant aggression in Nimma’s ‘crash’-strapped saga of raps-to-wretched. He is shown to be constantly at war with himself and with those around him. But we are never allowed any revealing insight into his presumably troubled background, except for one fleeting flashback of a relative being killed during the 1984 riots.
This seems like yet another Sikh-Punjabi trope appended for effect. Not much in Kenneda stays with you. After plodding through the episodes, I was left with an unfinished portrait of the artiste as an angry young drug peddler looking to justify his misdemeanours as a protest against discrimination.
But just because some white boys call you a brownie or curry-boy, or whatever, in school, you don’t become a criminal. Sorry boss, it doesn’t work that way.
