Hum Ek Hain

Plot

Hum Eik Hain begins with an Aaan showing Badshahi Mosque and other parts of Lahore with rather badly photographed (and badly lit) clips. The titles end on Shan (Mustafa) who is the muezzin. He is educated, wears jeans and is looking for a job. But he can't get a job even with repeated interviews. The academic degrees are not even worth good enough to be sold as waste paper. Trash must go to trash and the degrees are burnt alive in a rage of disappointment and frustration. There seems to be plenty of fire around at nights around Lahore with flames burning inside large empty drums (read 'a heavy symbolism of hero's agony').

Shan's mother is very religious who dresses like a nun in white. She helps children with Quran lessons and baptizes babies by marking 786 on their foreheads (it is supposed to be a good omen). Naghma was never a good actress and now her haggard looks and somewhat forced Urdu accent, does not make things any easier for her and the audiences. Coming back to fire in the streets, Shan watches a Maulana being gunned down in cold blood. He is a witness and must suffer at the hands of the police and the establishment.

Shan later joins Nisar Qadri's gang, delivering bags (containing bombs) from one place of the town to other and is instrumental in inadvertently killing his mother who happens to be traveling in one such bus to be blown up on Nisar Qadri's command. Incidentally Shan is strictly not allowed to see inside the bag and find out what deadly explosives he has been carrying and delivering. Now it is time for Shan to change his loyalties and he does that pretty fast.

He builds up a gang of his own the members of which wear red bandanas with 786 emblazoned on them. The villains must be paid in their own currency and the scores are settled on the occasion of Ashura when crowds are purifying their sins from events of Karbala. A van carrying explosives by Haider Sultan is averted minutes before but blood baths are choreographed simultaneously in the nearby deserted streets. The man behind these deadly schemes, Nisar Qadri, is actually butchered in his decorative temple, right across the street from Badshahi Mosque - now you know the significance of terrorists hitting religious monuments. In fact, Nisar Qadri's neat little temple with badly sculptures statues is shown numerous times with minaret of Badshahi Mosque visible right across the frame. One could call that pretentious framing and composition.

Cast