Friends, yesterday's episode was a crackerjack one for me - because I am a Brand Strategist by profession (as many of you know), so when I saw my favourite protagonists unleashing strategy-masterstrokes to win the day - as both Jodha and Jalal did - it gladdened my heart so much that I barely slept all night in the fuzzy happiness of it all!
Here's my high praise to both Jodha and Jalal. I am so kicked with the way they both "played the game" yesterday, that you all must forgive me if I go a bit overboard in my description of them both below:
The unleashing of the new strategically-thinking Jodha
Jodha was spectacular yesterday because she made her first steps into the world of strategy as an art form! Right up until yesterday, the very idea that she could use strategic thinking to approach life issues was unknown, it seems, to Jodha. It had not even occurred to her to use strategy as a weapon to win her causes! At least we viewers have not seen her use it before, not in a deliberate way.
She had grown up in a sheltered home and been filled with exalted values like humanity, righteousness, courage and strength. She didn't lack for physical or finer talents that her family encouraged her to pursue and excel at. She had moments of great personal distress but dealt with it all bravely, forthrightly, directly and frontally. Nobody in her family was a strategist, and although her father often talked of the need for a king to use strategy, the best card he has ever played so far was to make the alliance with Jalal for his daughter to save Amer - something that Chugtai Khan strategised for him, start to finish.
It may thus never have occurred to Jodha so far, I think, that in a lot of real-life situations, and especially in situations where one wants some good to come of it, one could be "smart rather than brave", and try to win with a bit of devious strategy than with direct attack. Indirect, clever, tactically-sophisticated and sometimes even "reverse" methods may need to be used to get goals met. The old argument that ends cannot justify means has its place, but some degree of "flexibility in the means" can often help serve the greater good than the most frontal rigid aggression can. All this came home to Jodha.
After her marriage to Jalal (and the attached Agra household) Jodha must have already spent many a day wondering how to handle and best these Agra people who were playing games she had not heard of in her own home as a child. People at Agra had individual and clique agendas and they played devious long-range games based on strategy. Jodha also had a husband who, it seemed, had grown up entirely in a "game-players" environment - and thus he, by sheer experience and not by formal learning, had acquired a very advanced degree of "street-smarts and strategic sophistication" that normal kings would not have dreamed of. Jalal, the man and husband and king, thus best recognised, understood and responded to "strategic plays" than to naive forthrightness, something that hit Jodha with force only yesterday.
The credit must go to Jodha for being a quick learner immediately after the idea struck her to use an indirect method to get her goals met on the thorny Fort vs Sukanya Marriage issue. Maham played a rather self-defeating hand, when she came to berate Jodha on her poor management of her husband Jalal. Maham said Jodha had erred time and again by attacking her husband rather than aligning with him. How then would he ever trust her word against others of his own household?
Much of what Maham said seemed initially to fall on deaf ears, but then suddenly it was as if a light went on in Jodha's brain! It became clear, the route was obvious: Why fight Jalal when it was patent that he played by the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth " strategy all the time? When you did bad things to him, he repaid in kind. When you did good things to him, he repaid in kind again. So why not align with him and his family, for that would be the surest way to ensure that he would align with her and her family?
Once the idea gripped Jodha's mind that she needed to use not direct attack or even direct pleas of reason with Jalal, the "devious" route and its immense benefits seemed to flash before her mind rather quickly, which showed me that she has a sharp mind to begin with. Only its never been used before to score victories of the kind she had yesterday.
As regards the actual dramatic effect Jodha achieved ... pleas, hugs, entreaties to Maham and Sharif - and most of all to Jalal - to see her change of mind, to see her new awareness that she was now an Agra-ite and not an Amer-ite anymore, and the final round of tears in her eyes ... it was all done beautifully. It took the whole crowd by surprise, if not by storm. Only Jalal, the greater tactician, had a gleam and a question in his eyes, for he recognised strategy when he saw it! He was also no doubt exulting that finally his exasperating chit of a wife had got her priorities right and she was smart indeed!
But one thing I must say for Jodha - which I am dead sure Jalal also knows and feels. I know that Jodha will never be the kind of woman to use strategy for negative ends and her innate sense of fair play will never let her become crooked, as a rule, unless the situation was intrinsicallly dire and requiring a well-intentioned outcome, for which a strategically deviant method needed to be deployed as a last resort.
The other important thing yesterday about Jodha was that in the learning of this art of strategy she also shed that last vestige of inhibition that tied her to her own family loyalties - and she did genuinely too make the shift in loyalties toards Jalal and Agra ... thanks to the earlier talks she had had with Sukanya and Bakshi Bano. So it is not as if Jodha was all subterfuge and deviousness. Her new found success at game-play was in part caused by a real shift in priorities towards her husband, and in part the learning of a new way to achieve success in tricky situations.
The unleashing of the unbeatable master-strategist Jalal
Jalal on the other hand was every bit the cunning, supersmart strategist that he always was and we saw a glimpse of his fabulous brain in action yesterday. He decided within one second of Jodha's act of loyalty-swearing, that Jodha's support of him and his family's izzat deserves to be rewarded by his upholding her and her family's izzat. He immediately summoned the entire Amer and Agra families together, along with the new Sasurji and his son, and proceeded to stun everybody by saying: "I made no promises of the Fort to anyone, but I did definitely promise my father-in-law Bharmal that I would get Sukanya married. I am hereby upholding that promise I made. And here is my sealed and signed handover of the Sultanpur Fort to the Sasurji. Now that everything's in order, can we proceed with the wediding without delay?"
Okay, the important part we shouldn't miss here is that word ""without delay". For Jalal had a really deadly idea to recover the Fort from the Sasur within hours of leaving Agra as soon as this marriage was over! He summoned Atga Khan to shift all the 5000 soldiers accompanying them to the Sultanpr Fort under the disguise of sending them back to Agra. No sooner was the wedding over, it was Jalal's plan to head for Agra via Sultanpur, and to grab his Fort back by sheer brute force and army strength, on the way back home!
We saw two beautiful aspects of Jalal in action yesterday, as he plannned, strategized and put his tactics into action. There was the Jalal who quickly recognised - and immensely valued - what Jodha had done for him using her masterstroke. He was happy for her, for her new awareness of him as a life priority, for her smartness and sharpness of mind, and her sense of trying to right the worng that had happened in the Sukanya marriage, despite having no proof wth which to nail Sharif. He gave Jodha quizzical looks, that she then had to return when she saw him hand over the Fort to the Sasur (to the gasps of the Agra members) and give orders for the wedding to continue. But then he gave her that absolute killer of a smile that could only have passed between two game-players who recognised each others smartness!
Jodha later told a furious Maham: "I had little to do with what Jalal did. He used his mind, and who knows what's on his mind? And as for what I did, it was all thanks to the idea you gave me. So now please let me pass and go urgently meet my husband ...". Jodha literally ran to Jalal because she simply had to have have his answer for why he had given away the Fort.
Jalal' s answer was a vindication of Jodha's anticipation of his thinking: "It was about izzat. You saved my family's izzat, and I save your family's izzat". But then he hinted to her that he was of greater depth than she could fathom. He tapped his brains with his finger and said: "My other plans will stay in my mind as my secret. Don't worry yourself about that. We have rasams to do together tomorrow so go and get ready ..." When he saw her looking puzzled he couldn't help thinking again that she was a smart cookie, for she still suspected his real reasons for the Fort-giving strategy! He merely smiled again (another killer!) and she left.
After that, of course, we saw the second Jalal at work ... he was seen staring at a plate of food infested by insects and explaining to Atga Khan how the Fort too could be gifted in way that rendered it "uneatable" by the Sasur! And then he asked for the army to be sent to Sultanpur in readiness for the grab-and-run of the Fort en route home. Jalal knew that Wajinder himself didn't want the Fort, it was his Dad all the way nursing his own avarice. That Dad didn't deserve a prime piece of Sultanate property snatched from the Shahenshah of Hindustan! Even if Sharif had promised it to him, how did he even have the temerity to ask for it in the first place? Who did he think he was playing games with?
If we were all not already impressed with Jalal, we had Pratap's running commentary that Jalal must be having an ace up his sleeve, for he would never hand over such a key Fort without some backlash. And Dadisa in the precap was so overwhelmed that she even insisted that Jodha needed to thank Jalal formally for the gift of Sukanya's wedding. The great mastermind Jalal seemed to be in thought in the precap, screwing up his face and looking ominous for some reason, as Jodha was last seen weighing the idea of thanking him!
I don't know about Jodha's thanks, but I sure feel like Jalal deserves a hug ... from the grateful but unsuspecting Sasur of the "short-lived Fort" fame!
The weakest link in the armoury of Mahamanga
I just want to add a last point about Mahamanga. Till today I thought her weakest link was her son Adham, for he would surely unravel all her strategems with his sheer brainlessness. But today I saw that Maham was a greater enemy to herself than her son would ever be.
She has this habit of making "one more visit to the vanquished enemy" and then revealing to the enemy the very strategy that would serve the enemy well. She's already showed many signs of this needing to "crow one more time" to the enemy in her earlier interactions with Ruqaiaya, Jodha etc .
In her eagerness to gloat over those she has quelled, she seems to overplay her hand, overshoot her mouth and inadvertently hand over a piece of key information that the enemy may well use to trap her back! Maham is prone to self-congratulation in front of those she has beaten, and in the seeds of that self-congratulation, she provides the very means for her opposition to strike back.
Maham's feet must be full of holes the way she shoots them time and again!
In future, Jodha must also make it her game to wait in patience for Maham to arrive after she has won a battle against Jodha. Maham will surely arrive with the strategy for Jodha to use swiftly. Sure as rain, the lady will arrive to pat her own back, and hand over a gift of a way out to Jodha! Jodha need do nothing. Maham will beat her at a game, and then allso come back and show Jodha how to beat her back!
