Shirish Kunder, maker of rather disappointing and average movies like Tees Maar Khan and Joker, has recently been attracting praise for his latest short film titled Kriti.
Among the people who praised the film is Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, who is known to watch movies and tweet his comments, mostly appreciative. Some other movie critics too have found Kriti a good film, in contrast to Kunder’s earlier attempts.
However, this morning there was an interesting twist in the tail. Aneel Neupane, a filmmaker from Nepal, claimed that Kunder had copied the idea of Kriti, presumably after watching BOB – a short film by Aneel released in October last year.
“Yesterday, I woke up to find Kriti on YouTube. Initially, I thought maybe the first few frames, the setting and characters resembled BOB. I thought it was just a co-incidence,” Aneel wrote in a Facebook post, “As the movie progressed, I was shocked to find so much similarities.”
Aneel says that he watched the movie as he is an admirer of actor Manoj Bajpayee, who stars in Kunder’s short film, but after realizing that it was a copy of his own movie, he felt angry.
“I’m angry not because Mr. Shirish Kunder practically stole the plot and made it into his film. I’m angry because we didn’t even have lunch money while shooting BOB, and a spot boy for Kriti probably made more money than BOB’s entire budget. My team and I didn’t work our asses off just so some rich dude from India could turn it into this and get away with it. That’s just not fair.” Aneel expressed his anguish.
An angry and hurt Aneel further wrote that he didn’t feel that he could fight Shirish Kunder as he was financially weak. However, he said that he felt good that Bollywood was now copying Nepali films as the trend was the opposite in earlier times.
This is not for the first time that Bollywood filmmakers have been accused of copying ideas without giving credit, but coming close on the Udta Punjab controversy where Bollywood requested people to stop piracy to support original and brave ideas, it sounds ironical.
It is also not the first time that Shirish Kunder has been accused of plagiarism. Many of his funny tweets were found to be copied from different sources, however that is not unique to Kunder as many popular accounts on Twitter have been accused of the same.
While Kunder may not have to explain his copied tweets, Aneel Neupane expects him to explain the copied idea for the short film. And Kunder did that by claiming that he was not friends with Aneel:
About their claims of a private Vimeo link shared with close friends on October 2015:
I’m not even their friend. Let alone close friend.
— Shirish Kunder (@ShirishKunder) June 24, 2016
