Jodha Akbar 79-81: Darkness before the dawn - Page 17

Originally posted by: Donjas

My continuation of thoughts on your magnificent post- Thanks again!

1 Jalal was on the verge of decapitaing that assassin's head. What value would there have been of this pilgrimage if he had done that, in cold blood, in front of everyone. There was not a moment to spare. Had Jodha not intervened, he would have done it. That is why Jodha's behavior in that situation was not objectionable. It was the right thing to do.There is no Maryada in emergencies.

I agree - not that she has much use for the maryadas in any case!😉 - and that is why I have noted in my post: I do not blame Jodha for intervening and offering the pilgrimage argument for sparing his life.

2 Jodha's acidic comments a few moments later were of course unfortunate, but Jalal has heard her say worse and he has learned to tune her out on such occasions.

3 Jalal is extra considerate towards Jodha because he considers her a recovering patient. After the suicide attempt he is unsure of how much she can take.

As I wrote earlier, I agree with this. Another aspect of the same feeling is his sense of kinship with Jodha because he sees their situations as similar. This sister aspect is the one I have cited in this post.

4 As for Jodha's accusations, they were spur of the moment words precipitated by her hatred for what Jalal and the Mughal empire stand for. Only game changing actions of Jalal are going to dissipate this resentment. You can already see one game changing action, Jalal saving Jodha's life from the Tiger, and one can already see improvement in her attitude towards him.

We will have to agree to disagree on this. I felt very bad - for her - about Jodha's rant during the Mohini segment. And as for her behaviour improving, as one will soon see in their first post-Mohan meeting, it does not improve towards him!

Plus, when Hamida asks her for whom she prayed, for the Shahenshah or for her husband, she replies that she prayed for his mother's son, for his sister's brother and for the man who faced the tiger to save her life. Not for her husband. Now this is not something she is saying to Jalal, so there is no need to hide things or be circumspect. Why does she not include "hamare pati" also, even if at the tail end of the list? He is her pati, after all, and she was shown being very moved during the khoon bhari maang scene. It was very odd.

5 Wow! That turn of the tide paragraph is a masterpiece of writing. How evocative!

I must thank you specially for appreciating a passage that I myself liked a lot. You are the only person to have done so!

6 Your logic that Jalal's understanding behavior is because of the kinship he feels with Jodha over both being rootless. That logic agrees with me, I believe it reinforces his recovering patient outlook towards Jodha. Yes. I have discussed the same thing above.

7 The hurt in Jalal's words as he makes a joke of the snake incident. Nobody describes it better.
I am glad you liked that part. He speaks all the time with this hidden hurt camouflaged in wisecracks, especially later in Amer. But Jodha is tone deaf and she simply does not get it. Or perhaps she does not want to.

8 Very perceptive reasoning of why Jalal wants Jodha's company on the hunt. Totally agree.

9 The logic of Jodha being a challenge for Jalal is another thoughtful argument, and again I agree totally with you.

Again, you are the only reader to have specifically noted and agreed with points 8 & 9, especially the former, which is the more novel of the two.

10 The Jodha psychological analysis was terrific. She is indeed a small town girl with a very limited experience of life. The missing apology reasoning is perfect.

Yes, she has no experience of life in a metropolis,and she seems to be always afraid of being laughed at. I find the latter difficult to understand. Jalal may talk of her akelapan, ruswayi and so on,but the fact is that in her sasuraal, she has got the best mother in law any girl could have dreamed of, who cares for her more than she cares for her son, and then she has Salima and Rahim. Why then should she feel alone and cornered, and why should she be afraid, when she knows that she has been in the wrong, of saying that she has made a mistake and that she is sorry? I simply cannot understand it. She has seen how Jalal, a Shahenshah, apologised for his blunder in open court. That was of course a far more serious matter, but the principle is the same in both cases.

Rarely have I see a post with so much psychological underpinning. This is enthralling stuff.

11 I enjoyed reading your mannat scene. The lover and the beloved argument makes sense, and before leap it was obvious, who was who. After the leap, I don't know. That distinction was no longer clear cut.

After the leap it had become old shoe love, where there is no lover and no beloved. They have both, metaphorically speaking, taken off their shoes, put their feet up, and are relaxed and comfortable with each other. There is no deewaangee in this stage.

12 I so enjoy the occasional humorous comment. My answer for the Nirdosh Pashu quiz, is it 5.
I am no longer sure😉. I am going to check that very carefully before I announce the winner!

13 I really don't know what to say about the Tiger scene and it's aftermath. It was superlative stuff. A gripping performance by Rajat as the dying man and an equally good act by Paridhi as the horrified wife whose blunder has come to haunt her. The pain in Jalal's eyes, the stuttering words, the panic on Jodha's face, the copious tears, all of it enthralling.

And you brought it alive in your analysis. Thank you again. I was particularly pleased with this segment, for all that it was the most difficult of the three to write.

14 Need I tell you what happened when I read the lunch options for Mohan. I had a tea cup in my hand. Good Lord ! I hope it was not too hot! If this had been in the US, some lawyer would have persuaded you to sue me for being the root cause of this mishap😉. And this is no joke; a woman bought a (paper) cup of coffee from a McDonald's, tucked it between her knees, and drove off. She had to brake sharply a moment later and the coffee spilled all over her trousers and scalded her.She not only sued but won something in an out of court settlement!😡

15 To more serious stuff. A tiger is 200 kg of solid muscle, aided by sharp claws and teeth, and a considerably faster reaction time than humans. There is no man who could wrestle with it bare handed and live to tell the tale. I agree.

The real question, that I did not add because I did not want to spoil the mood of that grim segment was this. How does Jodha know how to take the bullets out of the musket? The Rajputs did not have guns at that stage, and she could never have seen one. Nor is she shown asking Jalal how this gun works. It would have been much more interesting if she had been shown cunningly planning this as soon as she was told about the hunt, and gathering this technical info in advance.

This was a wonderful post to read and think about. Now all I have to do is search my little shrub of a first post in this thick jungle of 14 pages, for your response to my comments.
It is on page 1 and my response is on page 2. Well, this is nothing; I once had a thread of 63 pages!

Originally posted by: sashashyam

This is a free forum,my dear, anyone can enter any discussion any time!

Now that, Devki, is what is called the standard TV audience, reared on soaps and loving them. If this target audience, which is the one Ekta makes her shows for, is not the majority, how would her shows, and so many others made in the same cliched format, be so successful? Pavitra Rishta was distinctly more successful than Jodha Akbar, it was still going strong at 1000 episodes, and it was a favourite as far away as South Korea, where it won a TV award. But it was not what I would call an ever decent show, though the heroine did act reasonably well.

I am sure there must have been a huge number of fans for Paridhi, who is far more beautiful than the average TV heroine, and if the majority of these also liked her Jodha, I would not be surprised, for her character is indistinguishable from that of the made to order TV serial heroine with which they are the most comfortable.

I am sure Ruqaiya, as the main negative protagonist after the death of Maham ( and what a bad taste that scene left in the mouth, to see evil being thus mourned!) would also have had her own following - the one for the main female villain, also a staple of our soaps - though nowhere near that for Ashwini's Maham.

But I do not know about these two, especially Ruqaiya, having been an "equal reason" for the success of this show. You are proceeding on the basis of purely anecdotal data, restricted to your family members and friends, and then there is a vague reference to "many people" . That is hardly sufficient for making a judgment of this kind!

Rajat as the young Prithviraj was, I understand, the sole reason for the huge success of Prithviraj Chauhan, and I am prepared to believe that, for the TRPS plummeted as soon as the adult Prithviraj took over. Here, despite the pathetic, dumbed down version of Jalal that we had to suffer for fully half of the show, there is no way one can apportion credit so confidently. We have to wait and see what leading role Paridhi gets next and how that serial fares to see if her audience is faithful to her.

And as for Jodha Akbar, I believe that the decisive factor for its success was Rajat's Jalal. He is a superlative actor, and more important, he looked the part and radiated majesty almost to the end, and in such shows, that is what counts with the standard TRP audience.It was so with Mukesh Khanna's Bhishma Pitamaha in the 1988/89 Mahabharata, and with the actors playing Lord Krishna in both that and the 2014 versions.

I would have liked to see what happened if Paridhi had been replaced midway as Jodha, as they did with the Parvati in Devon ke dev Mahadev. That would have been a foolproof way of judging her contribution to the TRPs

Shyamala Aunty

Originally posted by: Ash67

Take a bow Sandhya!

What a neat thing that would have been! Would have solved all the problems too, CV's and ours. They would have got to show her hunars nevertheless and would have spared us so much angst. Then the love story (even this version) would be believable too as not only would Jodha have saved his life, she would have readily sacrificed her own for him in the Benz track.

If only Ekta would pick her CVs from amongst you all beginning with Aunty!

Originally posted by: devkidmd

Ashwinee, Sandhya,

The only problem with the above scenario is that Adham being such a DUMBO wouldn't have known the front from the back of the narnaal, which I guess was a new contraption at the time and might've blasted himself off into oblivion. This would've followed by his BadiAmmi dying, pining for her useless son(the CVs have to maintain at least some amount of respect for history😳).

We would've been left with only Sharifuddin and his leching and Rukaiyya and her scheming for vilians. I don't know how I feel about that...🤔

Maybe they would've increased Mahachuchak's role? Then the show would've turned into Cowboys and Indians...YeeeHaw!!!

Originally posted by: devkidmd

Ashwinee, Sandhya,

The only problem with the above scenario is that Adham being such a DUMBO wouldn't have known the front from the back of the narnaal, which I guess was a new contraption at the time and might've blasted himself off into oblivion. This would've followed by the BadiAmmi dying, pining for her useless son(the CVs have to maintain at least some amount of respect for history😳).

We would've been left with only Sharifuddin and his leching and Rukaiyya and her scheming for vilians. I don't know how I feel about that...🤔

Maybe they would've increased Mahachuchak's role? Then the show would've turned into Cowboys and Indians...YeeeHaw!!!

Originally posted by: Sandhya.A

How did Jodha know the handling of the narnaal then? Did her Sujamal Bhaisa train her in that? Was Amer equipped in this form of weaponry too? Then why were they not used against Suja and Shariffu? Weren't canons and rifles the Mughal trumps against the native rulers? Then how did Jodha know to operate it that too in seconds when Jalal was looking off? Oh! Forgot! She is EK serial heroine. Cannot 'not know' anything!😆

Adham could have the functional gun replaced by a dysfunctional one by one of his chamchoos! That would have served the purpose and spared all the Jodha-Jalal debates on the forum!🤣

Originally posted by: Sandhya.A

How did Jodha know the handling of the narnaal then? Did her Sujamal Bhaisa train her in that? Was Amer equipped in this form of weaponry too? Then why were they not used against Suja and Shariffu? Weren't canons and rifles the Mughal trumps against the native rulers? Then how did Jodha know to operate it that too in seconds when Jalal was looking off? Oh! Forgot! She is EK serial heroine. Cannot 'not know' anything!😆

Adham could have the functional gun replaced by a dysfunctional one by one of his chamchoos! That would have served the purpose and spared all the Jodha-Jalal debates on the forum!🤣