Dear Kunchu and Payal,
Thank you for inviting me to read your joint effort. I have done 5 chapters, and as for the first part, it is straight out of a Sooraj Barjatya film, complete with a totally affectionate family and all the shaadi ki rasamein. I know that both of you must have taken a lot of trouble to write all this, so I will not add that it seems very familiar, just that it is charming. Payal's choice of songs is impeccable.
Where I have a serious reservation is the part where the Anti-Narcotics Cell officer maltreats Roshni, the wife of a senior police officer, even if it is on a drug-related charge. This simply cannot happen.
It is, firstly, as Arjun himself points out later, that the ANC would have had to have a female police officer present when a female accused is interrogated (if you had been lucky enough to have watched Yash Raj TV's 2010 26 part series on the global and Indian drug traffic - Powder - a superb series that was on par with or even better than anything in this genre that I have seen on US TV - you would have noted this point, which was brought out very clearly. The accused there was a Nigerian woman). The courts would have taken very adverse note of such an infraction of this law.
But even accepting, for the sake of the argument, that the officer was rash enough to disregard this requirement. Also accepting that he is a nasty chap. Even so, he would NEVER have slapped the wife of an ACP, under whom he might be posted some day in the future. What would have happened to him then? His sense of self-preservation - and in a crook or a nasty character this trait is highly developed - would have made behave correctly, and even politely to Roshni. The way it has been written up is not at all credible.
Moreover, how is it necessary for your plot to have Roshni beaten up? I do not see that it makes any difference one way or the other. It is just a raising of the bar to create more sympathy for her, which is not necessary either, as I am sure all the readers love her already!
Lastly, there is no way Arjun could have been assigned to handle a case involving his wife. It would be automatically ruled out, for obvious reasons. Even in a court, judges recuse themselves from handling cases where they have some connection with the accused.
Then again, I can understand Roshni not knowing what to do when confronted with the packet of drugs. She is new to police work. But how is it that Anjali, who has been brought up among police officers, does not realise that it is dangerous to sit on the packet, when it is obvious that someone must have slipped it into her bag at the market, and equally obvious that that someone would be following her to get it back? It stands to reason that she should have called that Inspector Avinash. If they has handed in the packet, this situation would never have arisen.
I can understand all those weepy scenes with Roshni in ANC custody and Arjun tenderly comforting her - they are good for the FF TRPs! But I would have liked it better if at least one of Roshni and Anjali had been shown to have some clear thinking and commonsense, instead of behaving like the helpless abla naaris so beloved of Hindi films and TV soaps.
I mean the above strictly as constructive criticism, and I hope you both will take it in the same spirit. In a pure love story, you can do what you like, but in a police procedural, some attention has to be paid to the rules and the provisions of the law. Otherwise, you will be misleading your readers, which I am sure is not at all what you want to do!
To end on a lighter note, whoever wrote that scene of Arjun waking Anjali up deserves 10 on 10. It was very, very funny, especially her legs being where her head should have been, and her head nowhere to be seen at first and then to be found next to her knees! Delightful.
Shyamala Aunty
hey everybody...
Edited by sashashyam - 12 years ago
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