We must thank Amazon Prime, Clean Slate filmz, and Casting Bay for treating us with one of the most  enduring characters on any screen - Inspector Hathiram Choudhary of Outer Jamnaa Paar Police Station. All adjectives fall short of describing the magic actor Jaideep Ahlawat creates on screen, along with Ishwak Singh (as Chaudhary's UPSC-aspirant deputy Imran Ansari) in the Amazon web series Patal Lok.

Media reviews have predictably focused elsewhere - similarities with David Fincher's crime thriller SE7EN, Neeraj Kabi's portrayal as the marked journalist (he is good, but way short of the Ahlawat benchmark), or the beauty of Sudip Sharma's pen (he is truly outstanding, but there are flaws hard to ignore: that predictable effort to forcefully underline the 'Muslim' case, a few Bachchan-like escapades of Hathiram, and the Hindi belt ganglord-centric folklore that we have seen in Ishqiya and Omkara. However, Sharma's religious motifs and the central metaphor of the dog are undoubtedly a masterstroke, simply beyond words!)

Ahlawat lends rock-solid credibility to Hathiram's exploits - even the roundhouse punches and impossible jumps that the writer has thrust upon him. His acting is astonishingly devoid of any mannerism whatsoever - defining or otherwise...no dramatic pauses, sighs, or gestures to emphasize a point (and there are many he makes throughout the series)

You simply don't detect any 'effort' in his enactment: whether shouting earthy expletives with a rustic twang, savoring a dutiful late night dinner in solitude, catching up on lost sleep in state transport buses, ill at ease amid the English-speaking elite tribe, religiously jotting down notes in his 'ancient' diary, trying his best to play a doting father and miserably failing at that, or providing a pithy fag-end summary for the viewer's benefit in a one of a kind narration.We are not going to forget his words for a long time to come: "Sanjeev Mehra target hai hi nahi Ansari, target to yeh chaar hai"

Hope we see more of Ahlawat in the time to come, if and when he makes it big, hope he doesn't lose his way like the hugely talented but now derailed Nawazzudin Siddiqui.