Wednesday, 25 November 2015

episode 243 a man's reach






arnav ji takes care of his own... he is the best pati in the world... her voice echoes in him, around him.

he wakes up...

a poignant scene as a man ponders his action, possibly feeling terribly trapped. a tenderness for the woman who sleeps beside him fearless of consequences seems to come over him.

her voice in his ear, his heart, his inner spaces that have been lying dark and untouched for so long... he can't bear to see me in tears... he never lets me do anything by myself...

"arnav ji duniya ke sabse achhe pati hain..." arnav ji is the best husband in the world.

he stands at the window looking out... a habit to look outside, escape the clutch of four walls. this is what he does at home too, at the french windows he stands and gazes at the water, at the sky... out... there out there somewhere lie the answers maybe... a thinking man, an intelligent man, in a quandary like he had never expected in his life.

sleep in his eyes, he stands wide awake.

the crescendo of voices return, this time he hears his mother in law, the lady he calls aunty and cannot bring himself to call mother, but whom he has grown to respect and like and who treats him with understanding, tenderness. he knows a mother's heart is sensing things and feeling discomfort. maybe arnav singh raizada doesn't like this part of this conundrum too... an upset mother is never a part of his plans, though that is what this plan of his has wrought. 

"devi maiyya tum dono ko hamesha..." may devi maiyya always.


the atheist feels the yearning in a mother's words, she invokes what she believes in the most to bless her child and him with happiness forever.

the sound layers and what the director chooses to show are interesting, like the visual layers in flashbacks... it says things about what he reacts to, how he reacts, why he does what he does. the night of 15 february, valentine's day still at ipk, when he had screamed into the night, also a carefully chosen audio file. now too.

he is extremely moved by the conversation between a mother and her daughter.

rabba ve...

she turns and shivers under her blanket.

he comes sensing something, sees her and switches off the airconditioner. a simple act... but it shows perhaps what many larger gestures and gifts wouldn't.

you can feel the love all around... too bad neither have figured it out, or it's gotten hijacked by a night.

as he lies back he has made a decision, he looks at her. he wants to hold her hand. i get palpitation even typing that... so much in the performance.

i had felt earlier that the beast lay night after night next to beauty and seemed to ask, will you marry me?



this is the man who perhaps as he had walked up to her on the verandah just outside had hoped to be the best pati one day only for her, only because she had made him want such a thing even. when he said "bas karni hai," maybe he had felt a joy he never ever had and wanted to express it with his characteristic cool sexiness, playing with her, teasing, flirting, stealing a kiss and somewhere in the middle of that they would find and take over hamesha.

in his smiles, seen very rarely, and usually because this girl who is a bit crazy has set it off, he seemed to give hint of what all fantastic dreams lay in his heart. the one that beat with hers.

arnav singh raizada is not the best pati in the world and that does hurt him.




his way of trying to deal with the conflicting demands of the situation is to go gentle on her it seems, just let her be, stop berating and bashing her, and maybe in this his heart finds a little peace, a little happiness. and so we find a suddenly more tender man that moment on.

of course, this is around the time that writers decide to assassinate their favourite girl and leave her maimed for life. sanka is a superior, fine, perfectly distilled and matured in huge vats of feeling of life and character thing.
what was unleashed on us from the moment her eyes opened was not that at all, it was a clear indication that human beings were no longer in control. aliens had taken over.

"hum bhag na jaaye iss dar sa pakadke rakha hai hume..." so that i don't run away he is holding my hand. yes, he is worried because you may get abducted by creatures with three eyes and horns, green in colour who have made off with the writers, silly.

she tries to free her hand... he wakes up startled... "khushi!" on his lips. for a second all seems normal again. i feel my heart go into tremors.

once he was up, the game started again. she must not know what he is feeling, ah the guarded one. not too trusting of people and love... she gets no answer as to why "maine band kiya!" the ac.

as he leaves he turns, music lilts... palat palat ... ddlj moments everywhere.

from my first time here in this episode, i prepare myself, okay she is going to lose it now and so will we with that "ar 36 k". ah, so many speculations on the forum, in crooner, everywhere back then. alas the writer was just playing with us and trying to please aliens.

a little detail about the man, he has bad hand writing, why does this excite me? on the other side of lunacy, mami is chasing ghosts with binocs and book... how about garlic and cross, mami ji, let's make this into twilight, what say.

thankfully, a voice to bring me back

"khushi!!"

why must every call sound so terribly sexy and like he needs her from deep inside.

"aur haan, tumhara kaam ho gaya ho toh meri diary wapis rakh dena..." and if you're done with it, please keep back my diary in its place. so terriby sweet. he knows she is messing with his stuff, but he is okay with it... progress progress..

i think that is all i can take of this episode.

one thing only really moved me... that waking up, getting up, standing at the window and pondering... then turning, assessing, taking a decision of some sort and coming back to his wife. duniya ke sabse achhe pai is not really an aspiration for him. he does what he does because this girl makes his heart race, she matters. he hurts her, loves her, craves her, berates her, wants her not for some trophy but because that is all he can do... she is part of him. he is tired of resisting and he really does not want to be a nasty terror to her... he wants to pull her dupatta and kiss her on the cheek, wants to push back her tendrils, wants to catch her in his arms and swing her high, wants to tell her something, bas karni hai, wants to hold her hand.

i was always touched by something going on at ipk that was deeper than what you saw on the screen... anyone watching diwali will feel the thick layered thing in it... it pulls at your gut, your most physical instinct, your heart, your brain, your mind, the emotional... almost the spiritual plane in you... and then goes ahead invading and entering spaces in you that i didn't even know existed.

this happened with me often while watching. the entire night scene was humming with the heard unheard whispered murmured conversations.

wrote this on my facebook page yesterday when i posted these edits.

i am aware that in still shots sometimes you can capture a moment that seems to have much more than what it does in reality. but in ipkknd as they moved about often doing pretty regular serial stuff, somehow there was always a deeper unseen level that you could feel all the time. another conversation, something that murmurs and whispers in you even when you are trying hard not to let it effect you. loved it.






“ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
or what's a heaven for?” 
~~~ robert browning, andrea del sarto ~~~













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