Decoding Kohinoor! Telly Chakkar

In the first episode aired on 5 September, the thriller element, painstakingly built up, not only by the campaigns run by the channel, but also by the pomos on air, falls flat during the unnecessary flirtatious conversations between the two strangers (Kuljeet and Amit). It gets into focus only when Kali participates in the scheme of things. Manish Wadhwa, who plays Kali, looks impressive as the brooding assasin, who is driven by an unknown figure to kill in the name of higher good!

A thriller, like drama needs to hold on and persist with its thrill….otherwise it's just momentary and fails to keep the audience glued…this is what happened with me…I lost interest somewhere in the middle.

One great thing about the show is its opening montage -- the colours, the background score and the visuals complement each other and create a magic of sorts that manage to strike a chord. One character, who does much the same is Kali.

While Manish is good and can only get better as the show progresses, Ira (Kuljeet Randhwa) looks a little fake - a clear Indian dialect without any hint of a British accent (difficult to digest, as she confesses that this is her first visit to the country); Amit Sadh looks more like a comic relief, only the tension is not so gripping that one might need a character like him in the plot! Ankur's presence in the first episode was not enough for me to gauge his skills.

The plot along with the actors look edgy…but hopefully they will get better as the storyline progresses.

The storyline itself is definitely not original. The lead actor gets late night calls from a stranger (Irawati in and Robert Langdon in Dan Brown's novels The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons); an assassin (Hassassin in

Angels and Demons and Silas in The Da Vinci Code, here it is Kali), who receives instructions on the telephone; and there is of course the web of intrigue that has been woven around the supporting cast comprising of the obvious love traingle (expecting so from Kohinoor, Dan Brown had no influence over this track).

The plot is gripping enough, but Irawati Kohli's search for the Kohinoor, seems precariously close to Dan Brown's quest for the Holy Grail in his popular (but controversial) novel, The Da Vinci Code.

Oh…so close…yet so far...we can only hope that it will get better!