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The event was stereotype Prime Video: stretched with gimmicks, like a wafer-thin plot film expanded into two hours of “entertainment,” The gushy-gushy host, who tried to as usual show off by addressing select media persons by name, the usual pre-organized cascade of questions by them, all politically right, of course, set the tone for the mid-day meet at Mumbai’s J.W. Marriott.
The occasion? The trailer launch of Matka King, their latest series.
Needless to yawn, a lot of resources were splurged on contrivances like sets in the foyer, matka (earthen pots) given to every journalist with a “lucky” number within three of them. The prize? To be on stage when a magician performed his tricks with the age-old matka ploys (Okay, okay, will reveal what is Matka soon!)
The main team was all present, led by Amazon honcho Nikhil Madhok, producer Siddharth Roy Kapur, writer-director Nagraj Mundale (who came across as always like a bland version of Nana Patekar in looks as well as intonation!), writer-producer Ashish Aaryan and lead actor Vijay Varma, Sai Tamhankar, Kritika Kamra, Gulshan Grover, Jamie Lever, Siddharth Jadhav, Girish Kulkarni, Bhupendra Jadhawat and Simran Ashwini, and writer Abhay Korrane.
The introductory description of every character was done against a backdrop of giant playing cards and the obligatory mutual raves and rants came in.
Later, in the only personal time allotted to South Asian Herald, I got to spend a couple of frenzied minutes (there were other journalists too) with Varma, who told me that he had actually learnt the art of matka. Mastering it, he admitted, took a long while, but was necessary as while shooting, he needed the right responses from his co-actors who thus had to understand the gist of the way it was played.
The simplest explainer would be how Matka is described in the Wikipedia. Here goes: “Matka is a form of gambling. Matka gambling or Satta is a form of betting and lottery, in which bets are placed on the opening and closing prices of cotton, originally transmitted from the New York Cotton Exchange to the Bombay Cotton Exchange. It originated before the time of Indian independence, when it was known as Ankada Zugar (gambling of numbers). In the 1960s, this system was replaced by other ways of generating random numbers, including drawing slips from a large earthen-pot known as Matka or playing cards.”
More: The first Matka King was Kalyanji Bhagat, who came to Mumbai in 1941. “From the 1960s, his successor was his one-time colleague, Ratan Khatri. His Matka spread across the country and abroad. He had several lakhs of punters working as his agents. Due to this, the financial transactions reached thousands of crores of rupees. The American connection: Due to the five-day week in New York, Ratan Khatri’s Matka was open only five days a week.”
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