As a Bengali, I have traditionally struggled with the Hindi language, and particularly its ideas of gendered grammar, the stree-ling and pul-ling. Growing up, I was flummoxed by the fact that the word Police, in Hindi, is a feminine one, which doesn’t quite match up to the visuals of mustachioed constables demanding a little something — or, for that matter, even the moustache itself, the word “moochhein”, being a ki rather than a ka.

It was thus with some expectation of (at least grammatical) subversion that I walked into Ki & Ka which promised, in its tagline, that stree-ling and pul-ling are the same thing. But no: in this film the Ka — as in the Ka-poors, who act in the film — are okay, it is the Ki — as in Bal-Ki, who directs it — who stumbles rather badly. The film aims for something…