Friends, I am not sure how many of you feel a bit let down after seeing yesterday's episode. I am surely one of those who really thought the episode would create some kind of major turning point in the track and in the relationship between Jalal and Jodha. But too many things happened yesterday that seemed to neutralise the great anticipation we had of a "heroic save of Jalal by Jodha", and thereby lessen our satisafaction at the way things panned out.
One good thing was that the climactic moment did come in the very first segment of the episode itself, so there must have been a collective sigh of relief from all of us that finally "that moment" had arrived in the serial. But the events surrounding the moment were so fast paced and so many, that the climactic moment that we were looking forward to savouring got seemingly lost in the whoosh of multiple events!
Jodha's heroism happened, but then got sidelined, as it were, by the subsequent hostage-taking of Ruq and the faraar of Abul Mali ... so much so that Jalal looked like a man of divided mind, unable to spend more than a cursory few moments with Jodha really looking at the heroism of her act. He was in too many places at the same time worrying about too many other things. In fact, Atga had to tell him to go to Jodha while he took care of the rest! And even when he was with Jodha he looked like he had too many things on his mind and could not give her the undivided attention.
I would have personally liked the episode to focus exclusively on Jodha's act, on Jalal's reaction to Jodha's action, and for a greater play of sentiment across the fine face of Rajat, whose acting skills we are so proud of. After all I have signed up for the love story of Jodha and Jalal, and that is what I want to see as top priority. Instead all I saw was a fleeting glimpse of his eyes round and large as he took in Jodha's unconscious form, I did not see a variety of emotions across his face even when he was notalgic about the flashbacks of himself and Jodha, and very soon he was irate with the Ruq and Abul Mali situations - and any tenderness at all with Jodha vanished. It was only in the precap that the dargah scene showed some emotion in him again, leading me to wonder if the full import of what happened yesterday will all wash over him only in today's episode, after Ruq is safe and Abul Mali is out of his reach?
Which leads me to ask: How high - or how low - is Jodha in his priority? I have to ask this question here because it is in a crisis that one's true feelings come out. In yesterday's crisis, how much of his mindspace and heartspace did Jodha occupy, and how much of his mindspace and heartspace did other people occupy?
Again, I must stress, I am not sure how many of you agree with me on this disappointment with the episode, so I will like to say at the outset that these are largely my own views and I am open to others having their own views on this subject. Soon after the episode ended I got a spate of messages and callls from other forum members also registering their disappointment - and since the general trend of the majority I spoke to seemed to be more disappointment-oriented, I thought I would share this feeling in my post!
Of course, please do write to me here if you feel differently! Every opinion is welcome and right in its own way!
To make my point about the nature of disappointment many seemed to feel, I am first going to talk about what our expectation was and then look at the ways the episode seemed to fall short of it.
We were given to understand that the save of Jalal by Jodha from the poison of Ben would be of the kind that would "make the Rajputs proud". How did we get this impression?
One, we had four to five weeks of build up on this whole Benazir track, when for various reasons of making the story very dramatic during the climax phase, we saw Jalal misunderstand and even insult Jodha's good intentions and her story of having seen Benazir drinking the poison (even in the face of further subooth like the poisoned well!). We had encountered nearly five weeks of the "disbelief motif". We therefore expected that during or immmediately after the climactic scene, this disbelief would give way to "belief in Jodha", which never overtly happened yesterday!
Two, Jalal himself, in continuance of his already angry feelings after Jodha spurned his overtures, saw fit to treat Jodha insultingly many a time in the last four or five weeks. Even this we took on our chins, saying there have been instances when Jodha gave Jalal as good as she got, so Jalal may be partially justified in venting his frustrations on Jodha. Zee also told many of our forum members over our phone calls that since they wanted to show that Jalal was very confused by the "feelings he was newly feeling for Jodha" he was often turning his frustration around and venting it as anger and insults against her, and thus he was also over-reacting to Jodha's story about Ben. Yesterday, when Jalal saw that Jodha had made the supreme sacrifice for him, should there not have been some slight visible reversal in his demeanour to signal that he was in the throes of changing his opinions about Jodha? That never happened either.
Three, Jalal kept telling himself Jodha was jealous of Ben, and although that story was initially a figment of his own imagination and his "intent" was to make Jodha jealous of Ben, he later started "believing his own lies" and started accusing Jodha of jealousy of Ben, and attributed this as the cause for her spinning "vishkanya" yarns about Ben to prevent his marriage to Ben. In between, however, we still saw moments when Jalal was very decent to Jodha (like returning her room to her or even not berating her for the arrow strike on the boatride despite suspecting her) but then he would also end every interaction with some rude and anger-filled insults on Jodha, leading us to feel his ambivalence as a repetitive monotonous pattern of interaction with Jodha. Yesterday, however, after the great save from Jodha, I expected at least one sentence (at least of self-talks) that showed that Jalal had at least awoken to what Jodha had done for him, and seen this as proof that it was not jealousy of Ben but feelings for him that she had betrayed. But I saw no such self-dialogue.
Four, to add to all this we had Ruq and Maham add salt to Jodha's wounds by multiplying their rudeness and insullts to her. Ruq behaved extremely badly in the hand-lep scene and later in the hojra-changing scene, instigated by Maham ... but although Jalal seemed to redeem himself in some scenes with his attitude to Jodha being surprisingly good (like allowing her to stay on her room or not berating her for the arrow attack on the boatride), yet he never seemed to call Ruq to book on her behaviour. In fact in the hand-lep scene, he was even making eye signals to Ruq to grab the lep and apply it herself, and in the room changing scene he parted from Jodha with that horrible dialogue of "I never want to see your face even if you were dying!" In the light of such extremes of behaviour towrads Jodha, I would have liked to see a wee bit of remorse amongst the many happenings yesterday. But again events were so many and so fragmented that Jalal had neither the opportunity nor the moment to register any sort of remorse. Maybe we still have to wait for all that in future episodes, but a sense of dissatisfaction is there that the climactic episode had no room for some hint of mind-softening from Jalal towards Jodha.
Five, Jodha, for her part, was not helping things in the last four or five weeks, by insisting that she wanted to take all insults "manfully" and her only intention was to save Jalal - her suhaag - from Ben for all kinds of "other reasons" - e.g. Rajvanshi pride, kartavya, her marriage vachans etc etc. She couldn't bring herself to acknowledge she felt more for Jalal, which he wanted to hear she did. He couldn't help the anger he continued to feel for her "rejection of him" and matters were thus stalemated for weeks as Ben gained steadily in the storyline, going from being a mere baandhi into a Begum-to-be, blissfully carrying through her plot of wanting to assassinate Jalal, free Abul Mali from jail, and eventually marry Abul Mali after he got the throne. I wanted to see some change in Jodha as well, but all I heard from her choked throat to Jalal was more of the "I did my kartavya" dialogue! For having waited for four or five weeks in a total stalemate of the Jo-Ja relationship, could we not have been shown the first glimmerings of some small change in Jodha as well as Jalal?
Six, all our expectations went up many times over, when a spate of phone calls from all of us to Zee elicited the following information from Zee (not once but many times over). Zee said Jodha would save Jalal at the nick of the nikah with such a grand save that would make the Rajputs proud. They said Jalal would be devastated by what Jodha has done for him and he would realise he should have believed her and would be distarught about her life being in danger. They further said the love story of Jalal and Jodha would take a strong turn for the positive and the Akbar Ka Makabra scenes as well the Salim Chisthi bhavishyavanis were a sanket that the "long night of loneliness" was never to be ever gone through between them again and "the two would become one". After all this there was so much expectation surrounding the climactic scene, that we were bound to be disappointed when we were shown a flurry of competing events where Jodha's save was just one of the many happenings!
I know that we should have all had less expectation so that we could have less disappointment. I know that we should not have expected all the change in Jodha and in Jalal to manifest in the climactic episode itself and that realisation will dawn gradually on them both about the import of what had happened yesterday. But still, I don't think we were wrong in expecting some small but palpable signs of change, something to show that the scene had begun to change the people concerned. Instead I felt as if I was watching a fast-paced thriller, not a powerful love-story. If my expectations were out of place, I deserve to be disappointed ... but having waited for four to five weeks watching a stalemate, I felt I could have been given some hints of change in the emotions of the lead pair.
Below I've tried to pinpoint some of the exact places in the episode where the disappointment was at its height, for most of those who spoke to me yesterday ... see if you agree with me.
What actually happened in the serial during the nikaah scene, and which were the exact places where most of us seemed disappointed?
These are the events that transpired on the TV set, and I have marked out the parts which gave most people most angst!
Jodha and Jalal were shown separately praying before the nikaah. For Jodha time was fast running out to do something to save Jalal. She prays to Kanha to protect her suhaag, while Jalal also is in prayer asking that all should go well. Maham then arrives to fetch Ben for the nikaah, and a smiling Ben with a wicked gleam in her eye Ssays "I am more than ready!'.
At the nikaah, Salima and Hamida look concerned and fearful, while Maham and Ruq look on blissfully. There is a muh-dikhayi rasam to begin with, when the bride and groom are to look at each other's faces in a bowl of water. Jalal promptly remembers doing the same before his marriage to Jodha and sees Jodha's face in the water (much to his consternation) alongside of Ben's reflection. The Amer music plays in the background as if to signal this moment out between Jodha and Jalal.
Then the maulvis say there is to a "muh meetha karne ka rasam", and Adham is seen praising Benazir's smartness in including this rasam in the ceremony. Here Ben is given a pyala of sevaiyan to sip which she does - and she is about to hand over the pyala to Jalal to eat the rest of what she has tasted (and applied her poison to). But Jodha then does a sudden dive and grabs the cup away from Jalal and away from Ben, and then goes into a heroic dialogue. She says to Jalal "You said you didn't want to see my face even if I was dying. Now the time has come to put myself and my truth to the test. I drink this to save you from the vish that is in this pyala after Ben has put her mouth to it. If it means I may never open my eyes again, so be it. Alvida!". And with that she consumes the pyala's contents fully. (Jodha has flashbacks of Ben drinking snake poison and her talks with Sharif as she drinks the poison).
Immediately after drinking the contents ,Jodha is assailed by dizziness and she sways alarmingly and slumps as Jalal catches her from falling to the floor. Jalal shouts her name, but she barely hears anything. Again the Amer music plays as Jalal moves the sera away from his face and looks down at Jodha with his eyes huge in his face. There are flashbacks of his tender moments with Jodha, like scenes of their marriage, the day they both practised swordfights and he exclaimed at her beauty etc. Jodha through half-glazed etyes struggles to get the words out to Jalal that she has done her kartavya!
Now hardly is all this happpening in one area, when there is a fracas at the other end of the room. Atga and his men by now have all surrounded Ben with their swords drawn, exhorting her not to attempt to flee, but the resourceful Ben grabs Ruq as hostage and then goes into a long dialogue to Jalal (who by now has abandoned Jodha to his mother's care and a Hakim in another room) and has returned to the fracas here. Ben tells Jalal how he was her target of assassination, and how at every turn this Jodha was a spanner in the works preventing her chaal, and how the "bewakoof Ruq" was a total ass to vent her fury and jealousy against Jodha (thus rendering Jodha powerless to do more for Jalal's life-saving earlier), and how Maham was also an instigator of herself (Ben), encouraging her to best Jodha (and thus indirectly putting Jalal's life in jeopardy)! Having thus redeemed Jodha to Jalal as the saviour, and implicated Ruq and Maham as the ones actively preventing Jodha from her noble intent, Ben then flees on a horse with Ruq thrown across the same horse.
It is up to Atga to tell Jalal, "Leave us to take care of Ruq, you go to Jodha!" Jalal goes into Jodha's room where the Hakim says she has fallen unconscious soon after drinking the poison so they were not able to get her to vomit and eject the poison and it was racing through her blood stream. With a short caress of Jodha's forehead, Jalal then rises from the bed, anger in his eyes as he shouts at Abul Mali as the root cause of all this!
Then his men find that even Mali has fled the prison cell, for which Jalal goes into an even louder revenge speech-cum-holler. All the while Hamida and the Hakim seem helplessly watching near Jodha's unconscious form, saying the next eight hours should be crucial to Jodha's life.
In the great outdoors, eventually Ruq manages to knock a rock on Ben's head at an opportune moment and break loose, even as Atga's men surround Ben ready for capture.
The precap shows the Hakim telling Jalal that unfortunately Jodha was sinking and nothing more could be done to save her, whereupon Jalal is then shown at a dargah, crying bitterly and praying ardently for Jodha's life to be saved.
1. Considering the suppposedly life-threatening save that Jodha did for Jalal, and despite the flashback scenes and the Amer music, Jalal's own expressions of shock or dismay were less than satisfactory. He did not look as shaken or troubled or distressed as he ought to have looked. If the saving of his life was great indeed - of the kind the Rajputs would be proud of - where was the look of utter shock, bewilderment annd personal distress regarding Jodha''s condition, after what Jodha had done. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what was missing on Jalal's face, but he is such a consummate artist otherwise, that it felt a little less than satisfactory to see his facial expressions not quite living up to that climactic moment. Something was missing in his eyes, his demeanour - he was not as disturbed as he would have been expected to look. The Amer music and the flashbacks thus looked like they were trying to bring that tenderness to the scene, but when Jalal's eyes could not match their level of emotion, the result was even more starkly visible that Jalal was not entirely into that scene.
2. If it was supposed to be Jodha's grand moment, the story should have focused on Jodha exclusively. Instead, by making Ruq the hostage of Ben and diverting all attention after the pyala-drinking by Jodha to at least 10 minutes of Ruq in Ben's clutch, and then showing Jalal moving away from Jodha to see the Ruq-related fracas ... it all seemed to dilute the saving of Jalal by Jodha. The scene focused totally away from Jodha into all the other goings-on between Ben and Atga and Jalal and Ruq. This was no way to highlight the heroism of Jodha by taking her away from being the central point of the scene and by introducing the hostage-taking of Ruq. The end result was that until Atga found his voice to tells Jalal "Leave Ruq to me and my men, you go and tend to Jodha!" Jalal himself seemed to have forgotten Jodha! Jalal came across as more concerned about Ruq than Jodha, which to "awaiters of the Jalal-Jodha romance" looked like Ruq had taken off Jodha's sheen and had occupied Jalal's mind more than Jodha's brave act! A lot of folks just couldn't take this!
3. Jalal comes back to Jodha's side to be told by the Hakim that since Jodha is unconscious and has not vomited she is in grave danger for the next eight hours. Instantly, almost, Jalal springs away from the bed after a brief caress of Jodha's head - and starts a long diatribe against Abul Mali. When his men further come and tell him that Abul Mali is faraar from jail, he becomes even more voluble against Abul Mali, and the focus again gets shifted away from Jodha and her heroism to the miscreant Abul Mali and his evil schemes. So in effect, after Ruq had ceased to occupy Jalal's mind and has been carried away by Ben on the horse, even then Jodha is less on his mind and instead Abul Mali becomes obsession No. 1. In the naturalness of life would a man be more concerned about a seriously ill and dying wife or a lifelong frequently-returning enemy?
The redeeming feature of all this was two things:
One, thank God Ben did a good job of praising Jodha to jalal even as she decried the role of Ruq and maham in belittling Jodha.
Two, is the precap. Since Abul Mali is shown faraar from jail (and nothing more can be immediately done about that!) and since Ruq is in one piece after getting Ben caught, I presume that at least Jalal will get some opportunity in the next episode, away from all the other goings-on tof the eventful day, to focus exclusively on Jodha ... to ruminate on the magnitude of the saving of his life she has done by risking her own life, and the seriously ill condition in which she lies, awaiting a seemingly sure death when even the experienced lady Hakim throws up her hands.
I hope that is what the precap implies - that Jalal has finally thrown other things off his mind, he has focused on Jodha and her condition and is now filled with fear for her life ... and his tears, his prayers and his concern is for no one else but her!
Friends, today I didn't do my usual kind of analysis of the episode because I thought I needed to air the discrepancy between audience expectations and the actual scene of the "great save by Jodha" that we saw. Despite my overall disappointment however, I am ging to give Jalal and the Creatives the slight benefit of doubt.
Maybe the stooryline and scripting gave too much room for too much to happen, and it ws difficult for the Director and actors to extract much sentimental acting in such a fast-paced episode. But now after the dust has settled, the real import of the bravvery Jodha showed and the risk she took of her own life to save Jalal should bear down hard on Jalal and every one. I hope it will from the next episode onwards.
Maybe Jodha's "impending and inevitable death" diagnosis will be shown as a great shock that Jalal will really recoil from instead of being lukewarm about as in Monday's episode. Maybe the real emotional clanging in Jalal, his real tears, his real feelings, his real outpourings as a tortured soul will soon be on display - so that we can all see again why we like him so much for the sheer brilliance of his acting skills. Too much happened yesterday that led him astray from the crux - the climactic moment - of the episode, so we did not get to see the Jalal we know and wanted. I want to see how the episode shapes up today on all these fronts.
How many of you feel the way I did? How many of you feel differently that the episode yesterday was satisfactory? Would love to know all of your views, so please be sure to tell me!
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