Posted:
On this mental illness thing, I think back to Sriti's last serial Rakt Sambandh, where too she first had an abusive husband, and later a nicer one. There were some parallels b/w that and this, but not all - they did that serial in a much saner way.
I'll just discuss the parallel in question. In that serial, her first husband Yuvraj was a eunuch, who hid that fact and married her, and was obsessed about the public ever knowing about his sexuality. In this serial, Viraj is an OCPD sufferer. In that serial, the plot involved Yuvraj getting married to a blind Sandhya, hiding from her family the fact that he was a eunuch, and his family accidentally killing Sandhya's father while trying to prevent him from aborting the marriage on their wedding day. The plots against Sandhya involved taking advantage of her blindness to trick her into consumating w/ the other lead Neeraj, which didn't work out since she had a very good idea of everything around her. Things went bad, she found out and ultimately escaped, regained her eyesight and took down her inlaws.
To cut a long story short, near the end of the serial, Yuvraj and his family are arrested. He breaks free and runs into them, and in course of a fight, he falls from a cliff and dies. The matter ended there. He never got his due justice in terms of the marriage being annulled, which it should have been. Instead, Sandhya went on to marry Neeraj as his 'widow', which was a bit of a miscarriage of justice there.
One point that was made there was that that serial needlessly depicted eunuchs in a bad light, since the same story could have been written w/o making Yuvraj a eunuch. The other point made was that it seemed that eunuchs are outcasts and deserve no rights. Maybe they do, but that was totally tangential to the main story of that serial - a blind girl turning it around against her in-laws who killed her father and tried to cover it up, and then married the guy who originally loved her.
Similarly here, Viraj may have OCPD, but that seems tangential to the story, which is about DV. Actually, IMO, they've made a mess of it by mixing too many things here - domestic violence, OCPD and police corruption. In Sriti's interview that they published today, she tells people to speak out when they are being ill treated. Which is correct, but if one goes by this serial, then Jhanvi couldn't dare tell her family what she was actually going through, since Viraj was not only spying on her every moment, but also had the police and everyone paid off. This would give TV viewers the message to do exactly the opposite of what Sriti is suggesting. After all, if you know that the person you're going to confide in will get tortured or worse, why would you risk putting her through that? Normally, that's not something that people fear, and neither does this happen. But by making Viraj the closest Indian equivalent to a Soviet era KGB agent, they needlessly over-dramatized and complicated this.
So yeah, he may be suffering from OCPD, the police may be corrupt, but don't expect that to be meaningfully addressed in this serial, even if they were the ones that brought it in.
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