episode 260 why him

"hume chhoone ki koshish bhi mat ki jiye aur bahar nikal jaiye yahan se," don't even try to touch me and leave this room, she says.

he grabs her hand.

"aapke aansoo sirf usske liye bahte hain jo aapko sabse zyada dard diya hai," your tears flow only for the one who has given you the most amount of hurt, he is perplexed, pained almost. why is it so, he wants to know.

"aapko sach mein nahin pata..." you really don't know, do you... she has a strange smile as she says that.

there might have been no need to write anything on this episode, watching was hard enough, but for the little something i thought i noticed in the shyam khushi interaction.

was there an attempt to bring back complexity... that natural human element of envy and obsession, both quite a part of shyam's mind. he directly asks her what is it about the other guy that makes her want him, his touch though he is so incredibly nasty to her, gives her only sorrow and hurt, it seems to really perplex him. yes, he is disgusting to even be there with that phone as his excuse and his weapon... but he felt more real for an instant than the lecherous obvious flat one of the shirtless episode and the others in recent times. his agony seemed genuine and his obsession too... he lost his cool with his wife. the carefully maintained facade which holds through most things, slipped. something about khushi wanting asr and almost telling him how much when she says rhetorically, you really don't know do you, just penetrates that thick coat of self enraptured amoral/immoral excessive egoistic godless gunk and he bleeds. he also knows that his game was not played to adroitly, she knows he is not interested in the papers he had been feigning great interest in just to keep her on tenterhooks and perhaps to adhere her to him. both his dil and dimaag are challenged. it leaves him shaken.

my feeling, in a rather inspired creative take and with clever writing, shyam in his core was the other side of asr... shyam was often painted with asr like features but with definitely the ugly end of the brush. he too had that shatir thing, he too had a feeling for khushi, he too believed in making his own life... but he lacked an essential element, something asr practically defined... conscience. and yes, an inalienable purity in the materials that made him... shyam was ashudh, impure incarnate, maybe that's why his hindi had to be so shudh, so pure. and so we saw the other side of those very traits. no idea why but i am thinking of ghee spilling on asr at janmashtami and some sort of message of his purity coming through, ignore my wild mind.

for a moment i felt for shyam that more complex feeling... he felt like a real human being with a completely messed up character. something of the fallen angel perhaps in him... the one he adores shuns him and prefers another. no matter how wrong or warped or vicious he is, a sense of an emotion in him, a genuine cut.

had they worked with that, might have been interesting, but they kept waffling and shifting and finally made him completely meaningless.

i must say, i felt bad for abhaas. not a bad actor he... to have stripped his shyam of all subtlety and made him loud and meaningless was not good for the story and really sad for abhaas. he might have pulled off a far more shaded character, though yes, shyam never ever was the true antagonist of asr. stature just not there.

here his envy of asr is quite clear... what is it about him that you like so much... why do you reject me.

hints of this will keep coming up i seem to recall. but nothing will be done to make it part of narrative.

apart from this one thing, 260 really felt as though all creatives had taken time off and left writing, direction, editing, sound, everything to rookies and interns. perhaps 258 and 259 exhausted them.

otherwise how can anyone after those dhamakedar twist episodes, for once living up to the eternal tv serial promise, have regressed to this.

in terms of the logic of khushi opting out of involving cops and looking for private investigators, there was nothing off. but everything else was. everything. including the way manorama mami's antenna sprang up and how she got involved. it was as if people with no knowledge of ipk were suddenly directing it. and what was that whole detective agency set up... the writing was so obvious you wanted to run and hug them and say there there... really.

i have noticed that in my earlier pieces i have said that i believe writers led by ved raj and gautam hegde tried their best to hang onto the whole thing, but channel and trp and an "adjusting" production house were too much to push back against. i am a copywriter, i know these sort of pressures can ruin things... but now more and more i feel, someone fairly senior among the writers also just let it go... lost the passion.

that was the thing.

that passion one could always feel earlier now seemed to diminish. only to reappear in little patches here and there. and every time it did, it brought utter beauty. alas the lack of passion also took us to the other end of that.

260 certainly was not touched by passion.

and there was no barun. 

......................

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