Happiness is my new mantra. Buoyancy, my new currency. I'm determined to be cheerful and have made an art of avoiding killjoys.

Last week was 'picture' perfect. Much against my better judgement, I enjoyed Salman Khan playing his brattish self in the screwball comedy, Pyar Kiya To Darnaa Kya. I would have called the role tailor-made but it would have been incongruous with the shirtless Salman. Next: I had promised my daughter a film cum dinner evening a deux (no wife, just the two of us) and we had a whale of a time seeing the fluffy love story, Dil To Pagal Hai, for a second time. In the evenings, I read either Charlie Brown or the cartoon capers of Dilbert; the latter I discovered when a friend gave a Dilbert collection as a birthday gift with an aptly scribbled line on the opening page: 'Life is relentless. Smile a little.'

So, given the current state of mind, you can imagine my resistance to previewing Ram Gopal Varma's 'Satya', a stark and extremely violent film about the Mumbai underworld. But I steeled myself and settled down on the sofa of the comfortably air-conditioned preview theatre at Famous Studio because of two sound reasons: Firstly, Ram Gopal Varma has an experimental streak, a rare quality in today's breed of money-motivated directors. (Whether it works like in the merry musical, 'Rangeela', or backfires like in the spurious spoof, 'Daud', is not so important).The second reason I braved Satya was hero Chakravarthi's (Chekri) assurance to Movie: "The film has more mental violence than physical. Being beaten by hockey stick is physical violence, while waiting to be pricked by a needle in your eye is mental violence."

But as I sank in my seat, so did my spirits (albeit only for the first three reels). I realised Chekri had led me up the garden path, and a bloody one at that. The entire row of people (including a bemused firang girl) sharing the sofa with me watched many-a-scene through their fingers, the violence was so in-the-face. In more ways than one.

Chekri slashes a man's face with a razor, an underworld kingpin kicks Chekri repeatedly in the groin, an inspector presses an assassin's crushed-below-a-scooter leg to make him squeal...My initial reaction was akin to what I experienced when a leper's outstretched palm reached out to me at a traffic signal. A part of me just couldn't help recoiling and shutting him out by rolling up the car window. For the same reason I didn't want to see 'Satya' - if the reality is so harsh, no wonder people take recourse to candy floss fantasy.

However, by the time 'Satya' raced to the interval, I was totally immersed in the film. The film hits you like a ton of bricks - and not because of the unheard-of-in-Hindi-cinema- till-now expletives that are sprinkled all over the film. But simply because Ramu knows his directorial onions. His characters have untidier, more complex lives than those in a DTPH. And he injects his characters with a bead-sweat desperation that's impossible to tear your eyes away from.

Satya, ironically, is the name of a man (Chekri) living a lie. A nowhere man, a, migrant to Mumbai, his descent into the underworld runs parallel to his growing love for a simple girl (Urmila) who is unaware of his criminal activities. The girl is named Vidya (knowledge) a la Raj Kapoor's voice of reason, Nargis, in Shri 420.

The director's intention is to portray criminals as people who eat, drink, make love, feel, marry, live and die-just like the rest of us. In short - gangsters are people too. Gulzar's lyrics in 'Bhejeko goli maro' besides establishing the easy camaraderie shared by the drunken criminals also accentuates the thoughtless stupor that is prerequisite to acts of violence (Aside: Incidentally, in Urmila's distracting rain song, Gulzar's lyrics talk of 'Geela pani'. Like there is any other kind).

The graph of Chekri's character begins with "I'm not scared of death" and culminates with his proclamation towards the end of the film: "I'm scared of losing the person I love."

But Varma seems to vouch, violence only begets violence. The only redemption that Satya can hope for is death.

What helps the film immensely is that the director keeps the action moving forward without ever losing its grip on the audience. Ramu's flair for lights and sites is awesome. The scene where the fugitive Chekri, trapped by the cops in a theatre, fires a bullet into the floor resulting in a stampede vouches for Ramu's feel for the subject.

But what works best for the film is that besides Urmila and Paresh Rawal, the rest of the cast is relatively unknown and you don't know what to expect from them.

Chekri is compelling. He speaks little but has soul-dead eyes which complement his character. Unlike Ramu's earlier 'Daud' where the unexplained background of the characters was made into a running joke and it worked, here ambiguity of origin makes him something of an enigma. But it is not a fatal flaw.

Urmila is very good as Vidya, albeit she simpers too much. What is remarkable is that her performance comprises largely of reactions. She is very effective in the climactic scene where, having learned about Chekri's background in a humiliating interrogation, she sits bunched tight and responds in little arpeggios of emotions to a dying Chekri's anguished appeal for understanding. If her character seems ever-so-slightly cardboard it is because she is shown as not knowing what her man does for a living, which is highly improbable. Besides for a middle class girl to escape to Khandala with her boyfriend for four days is quite eyebrow raising.

Unlike most films where the hero-heroine are fleshed out whereas the other characters are left to fend for themselves, the series of well-etched cameos in Satya is fascinating. Manoj Bajpai as Chekri's partner in crime is in first rate. Shefali Chhaya as his harried, harridan wife (remember her rib-tickling takeoff on Sridevi in 'Rangeela'?) immediately gets into the skin of her role, the restaurant scene being her piece de resistance. She colours the dark film with moments of laughter. The unknown-to-me actor who plays the fatty Mamaji and the actor who plays the jokester Chander are so true to life that they could have been waiting outside the preview theatre and I wouldn't have recognised them in their original avatars.

Finally, of course, is the issue that the protagonist (Chekri) doesn't forfeit audience's sympathy despite his villainy. Is it right? But it is to the director's credit that despite the violence crossing the crime threshold you realise the director is proselytising in favour of nonviolence.