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Figuring out the thinly disguised names of real people and places in fiction is like solving your favourite puzzle. People of Thiruvananthapuram would have squealed in delight to find its localities, its infamous goons, and their stories hidden in plain sight in the new web series by Krishand, adorably titled The Chronicles of the 4.5 Gang - Sambhava Vivaranam Nalarasangham.
Krishand is a trusted name, surprisingly, both among the audience of serious cinema and the fans of fun movies. His scripts have a tendency to dip dark themes into layers of humour, producing a very interesting brew on screen. He may be best known for Aavasavyuham — a surreal fantasy that won award after award — but he seems to keep trotting back to comedy in unprecedented ways. What you get is not the slapstick of Siddique-Lal or the satire of Sreenivasan. Krishand's brand of humour is dark and on the fringes.
In Sungsuvinte Sangharsha Ghadana or The Art of Warfare, his last feature with an anti-war message, humour emerges from unlikely situations involving criminal gangs. In Purusha Pretham, his 2023 feature, comedy floats side by side with the corpse of a man drifting down a river. His earlier ventures — the web series Utsaha Ithihasam - The Saga of the Spirited (2018) and a feature film called Vrithakrithiyulla Chathuram - A Minor Inconvenience (2019) — are both dramedies.
In The Chronicles of the 4.5 Gang, about a few gangsters from the slums of Thiruvanchipuram (yes, the thinly disguised pseudonym for the capital), humour is camouflaged, easy to miss but very much there.
"I had some serious gangster material but underneath it was a lot of grey humour that I could pull off. Showing only crime will look so dark and I decided to present the whole thing like a joke,” Krishand tells TNM in an interview from Kochi.
There is no need to ask: he is from Thiruvananthapuram, and he has known, very deeply, stories of the goons he wrote about, having lived among them as a child. For the series, he did not rely only on old memories but conducted fresh interviews, researched, and built fiction from very real stories.
“The story about the kidnapped music director or the one about ripping off the ATM machine are legendary,” Krishand says, referring to events in the web series. Actors on his sets seem to shed all the typecasts they have been forced into. Sanju Sivram and Niranj Maniyanpilla Raju play two of the gang, while newer actors such as Shambhu, Sreenath Babu, and Sachin Joseph play the others. Sachin plays the “half” member of the gang because of his shorter stature.
Santhy B, Zarin Shihab, and Darshana Rajendran play rustic women with unexpected depths. Old-timers Jagadish, Indrans, and Vijayaraghavan prove that any role — weird ghostwriter, petty criminal, arrogant artist — is safe with them. Krishand's favourites from earlier films — Rahul Rajagopal, Prasanth Alexander, and Vishnu Agasthya — join other young talents such as Hakkim Shah and Anoop Mohandas to make it all the more fun.
All the actors appear comfortable speaking the Thiruvananthapuram dialect and inhabiting lives of crime. Krishand is in the pack too, mostly as the face in a poster or on a movie screen, playing the favourite superstar of the colony residents, Vikraman.
He laughs as he talks about the role. “The original idea was to cast a Malayalam actor, who is a rising star and will be like Vijay one day, but logistics made my Chief Associate suggest that I don the robes. I am anyway there on the set everyday, it made it easier. Playing the star, I realised why certain actors behave in weird ways, because they are pampered so much. There is too much entitlement that makes it difficult for them to see the humans who work to make sure they play believable characters,” Krishand says.
He is not entirely comfortable with acting though, except in close circles such as his own set. Krishand is clear about the part he wants to play: that of a filmmaker, and occasionally a graphic artist. If time allows, he would continue his adjunct job teaching at IITs. That’s his alma mater, the IIT in Mumbai, where he studied visual communication after his stint as a software professional.
He never received formal training in filmmaking but made films as part of the master’s programme at IIT. That, and years of watching films at festivals, tuned his path — a middle route in filmmaking, not quite offbeat, as he would tell you.
You can spot a uniqueness in his formula. Here, he writes about poverty and crime — boys from slums, belittled at school and everywhere they went, wanting to shake off that image and swayed by shortcuts. Mouldable as teenagers, they fall into the hands of a rotten police officer who pushes them into pit after deeper pit. These are not visuals of gory violence or sob stories. As the events unfold, you listen more for the stray one-liners that bring a laugh, the splitting of a scene into three telling images, the newspaper cuttings that tell the gang’s story to the world. Krishand puts you on the side of the gang but without righting their wrongs or attempting to lessen their crimes. He just reminds you of their human side, takes you to their homes, their families, their infatuations, their undying love for each other.
“I have known these people, living as I did around them for years. So I feel unhappy when they are misrepresented,” he says, even as he makes no attempt to glorify them. His approach brings to mind Katherine Boo’s Behind The Beautiful Flowers, for which she spent years with people in a Mumbai slum to write about them, exposing the truth of their lives without altering their flaws, and drawing them all the more close to you.
Asked about the risk of stereotyping people living in the slums, Krishand fervently says no, that is not what the series does. “It is looking at the ecosystem of these men – not just their poverty but their mental health, their family health, how they are treated at school, at home. We are not saying everyone from the slum becomes a criminal. But for these men who did, you can trace their stories to what kind of lives they’d had.”
At the end of every episode, the end titles are accompanied by a series of pictures — Krishand’s own artwork. Even as a child he loved to sketch the stories he heard. As a grown-up, he nurtured that love, letting it grow alongside his passion for film. He makes storyboards with his drawings, sometimes entire sequences. A graphic novel is also in his mind, for some day in the future.