Hi friends, how are you are surviving this last week of episodes? Jyoti is busy celebrating Durga Puja, and like a good Bengali she must be eating truck loads of tasty rossogollas one after another (lucky girl!), while I am doing this homework of the Weekend Thread, so I hope you'll will forgive me if I make some mistakes here and there in between my sobbing and crying! Jyoti will join in later (with rossogollas I hope!)
Waise, I wanted to do a list of ten highlights of the week gone by, and my gutter mind was continuously thinking maybe I should make a detailed list of ten places where Tiger Mohan bit Jalal. Because those would have been the Super High Points of the Week! There are four bites we have seen on his face, plus two more on his hand that he showed to Rahim. That makes six bites. Remaining four bites I ll leave you all to fantasize! Let's see who comes up with the best four "spots for hidden bites" on Jalal's utterly edible body ... please rush your answers to this thread!
Accha, now turning more serious, here's my pick of the highlights of this week:
1. The tiger fight and the rescue were well directed!
Last week itself Tiger Mohan was seen prowling round the countryside and this Monday began with a bang. Or rather it did not begin with a bang because Jalal's gun would not work without the bullets that Jodha had removed! So we had a hand-to-hand combat between Jalal and the tiger in which, after getting bitten black and blue, Jalal vanquished the tiger. These scenes are difficult to shoot, we know that, but I am happy overall that it did not look like a botched up job. It was a reasonably well shot and directed sequence and the tiger fight at least looked credible. The wounds on Jalal's face and body also looked reasonably credible, and not like pasted on Plaster of Paris (execpt one or two). So all in all I'd give about 70% marks for the tiger sequence. The rescue part by Jodha also was nice, especially where they are on horseback and she holds his face to keep him close to her! And the dialogues by Jalal in his "breathless husky voice" were sexy! It was brilliant that in that dying declaration Jalal forgot Maham totally as he mentioned Ruq, Hamida and even Jodha! Monday was good except for one thing that sorely disappointed the viewers ...
2. The outdoorsy wound-nursing did not happen!
Yes, we were all given the impression that Jalal and Jodha would adjourn to some convenient tabela in the forest, they would light a cozy bonfire and there Jodha would tend to his wounds amidst lots of very coochey-coo moaning sounds from Jalal - and then Jodha would blow soft air on to make them feel better etc. etc. etc. Unfortunately nothing of the sort happened! Instead the soldiers rushed Jalal back to Agra as fast as they could and only strange part was it looked like the Creatives forgot to put Jodha on a horse because when she arrived at Agra she looked as if she had walked the whole way back! Jalal's family took over the whole scene and Jodha was left looking very guilty on the sidelines, and although Jodha had nightmarish visions earlier of having to tell the family that Jalal was dead, in fact he was still very much alive and so the viewers were given about two and half episodes of Jalal without a shirt and covered only in leaves! Jodha got three tights slaps from Ruq - which was also one of the high points of the week.
3. Agra patient hungama and the bad sides of everybody!
Accha, this is my favourite part, how everyone reacted when the patient arrived in Agra. Firstly Adham started making plans to ascend the throne! Then his mother took charge of the army in full style, looking like a hilltop Hitler, and giving a speech which was full of "naaraas". The ending of the speech with the hurrahs to the emperor were straight out of C-Grade war movies, and I have a strong feeling that the soldiers below were yawning throughout this fiery but demotivating speech. Meanwhile of course, the Rajvanshi enemies were acting as if it was Christmas, and everyone was ready to uncork the champagne in anticipation of Jalal's death (all except Maharana Pratap who was sorely missed in this sequence by me!). Here in the Agra palace, bandhis were gossipping about the state of the Shahenshah, some harem begums led by Salima were getting ready to eat a full meal and then consume poison (which again Ruq wanted to be the "first" to do!) and some other desperate harem ladies who never had a chance yet with the Emperor thought it would make amends for their lack of time with the Shahenshah if they could run away with the jewelry at least! Jodha and Kanha were inseparable, and Hamida showed that her hysteria was as good as Mainavati's ...
4. Hamida shows her screwed up "Jodha priorities"!
One of the lowest (rather than highest) points this last week was how Hamida Banu showed her desperation to get Jodha safely out of the clutches of those who would like to kill her, when her own son Jalal was dying and the Hakim had barely given him one more day to live! I have already done an exhaustive post on this topic because this sequence defied all logic! Was it an oversight on the part of the Creatives to make Hamida show her screwed up priorities? Or was Hamida so gone on Jodha that as Jalal himself once said "She loves Jodha more than she loves me!" ... In the end of course, Jodha managed to save herself by making some miracle lep and curing Jalal, but even in that situation how Hamida could accept some amateur lep made by Jodha as a last resort cure for a dearest son who was on his last legs was a total mystery. The character of Hamida got assassinated, and by association, the character of Jodha too was not at its shiniest! The whole situation smacked of the incredulous!
5. Adham, Sharif, their stupidity and their soldiers!
I loved the interludes we had with Adham Khan and Sharifuddin and their whole band of buffoons! First of all Adham did the foolhardiest thing and called his wife "Fatima" and then searched around for other names till he got around to her real name Javeeda! Thankfully the wife was sillier than the husband and was only interested to see if the necklace he gave her was a fake or not! Then Sharifuddin somehow sprang into the room from behind the curtains! And both the men started saying "Do you want Agra or Delhi?" as if they already had the kingdom and only they needed to ink the contract! Then both congratulated each other that their soldiers were stationed on the road to Agra to prevent the Gwalior Hakim from reaching Agra and saving Jalal. Thus they were going to capture Delhi and Agra between themselves. For this wonderful plan, they had both selected some bony-puny soldiers who looked like they had not eaten for months - and when the two sets of soldiers then suspected each other and began a roadside warfare, the Hakim escaped to Agra to help Jalal in a spectacle that was this week's finest moment! But look at Adham and Sharif after that. When they both discovered that their plans had gone kaput and Jalal was alive, they both gave dramatic speeches with narrowed eyes of "intezaar karenge" as if it was a wonderful new idea! What other choices did the two duffers have?
6. Hakimery at its finest was on full display!
I enjoyed myself this week with my post on the Bada Hakim from Gwalior, the Chota Hakim from the local garden shed, and the Hakimlette (Jodha) and how the three of them did their quackery to save Jalal. The only redeeming feature of this whole display of medicine-men-and-women and their leps and leaves and flowers decorating Jalal's wounds, was the fact that we were able to see glimpses of the bare-bodied Jalal quite a lot and were greatly satisfied with what we saw! Jalal in clothes looks good, but Jalal without clothes looks even better! Meanwhile, the scene of Jodha learning lep-making from the self-same Gwalior Hakim in Amer, where he was brought by none other than Chugtai Khan, was all a bit too much to swallow. It was again one of those unbelievable spins of yarn that Jodha would have learnt it all from the same Hakim, and that Hakim would then just smell Jodha Ka Lep and say only Jodha could have made it! And while the Hakim had been brought all the way to cure Jalal who was breathing his last, the Hakim was actually wasting time telling everybody the story of Sujamal's injury in a similar shikar incident! On the whole this treatment and cure of Jalal was very badly scripted and directed and I would give it just about 30% marks (all 30% for showing Jalal's bare body and nothing for the rest of the cast and the script!)
7. Ruq getting distraught, the Amer shaadi and the flirty Jalal!
The episodes on Thursday and Friday also brought us the high points of Jalal getting well and Ruq getting increasingly distraught. First the shots that showed how Ruq ran to Jalal's side after hearing he was so critically injured were beautiful at first glance, and I remember even feeling very sorry for Ruq for she looked like a young girl about to lose her dearest friend and she had in fact no other family! But on second glance all the flashbacks we were shown of Ruq's childhood with Jalal were about when they both were barely 8 or 9 years old. There were no flashbacks of them in their teens, adolescence or middle years? I wondered at the time why that was so? And then it occurred to me that may be this was the weak link in the Jalal-Ruq relationship. They were both in a time warp, they had forged their bond at 8-9 years of age, and the bond had probably not grown into something else over the years! At least that was the symbolism I got from the flashbacks!
Then Maham started poisoning Ruq's ears against Jodha and her growing closeness with Jalal after the Ajmer trip. After that, Jodha did the miraculous by making people forget the bullet-removal issue by succeeding with the lep issue. Ruq must have already felt checkmated by Jodha, especially after she had earlier landed three triumphant slaps across Jodha's face for endangering Jalal's life.
Anyway in the Thursday episode out came the story of how Jalal had himself found the rishta for Sukanya. As if that was not enough, in the Friday episode, Ruq seemed to get more and more insecure as Jalal overruled her diktat and accepted to go to Amer, and then Jalal pullled that "joke" on her about being in love with Jodha to see how she reacted before saying it was just a joke. Now the Amer trip sans Ruq is in the offing and Ruq must be surely feeling that Jalal was slipping away (Jyoti, I am happy to tell you that I noticed the sunset as a symbolism of the sunset of their relationship!)
I have already done a detailed post on this whole Jalal-Ruq disenchantment that is on the way to happening while the Jalal-Jodha flirty side has seemingly begun. My premise on my post has been that Jalal now is ready to take his relationship with Jodha one step further (even if it's not yet love) and he has got flirty, but on the other side he senses Ruq's possible alarm and has yesterday done this "joke" story to check out how disturbed Ruq may be about his growing closeness with Jodha.
Fan Fictions
Kabhi Neem Neem Kabhi Shahad Shahad
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