*Season 2, Week 5* Analysis Thread - Page 35

Completely agree with you. I feel more than god, he is cv's favorite punching bag and scapegoat available anytime. They played with his character ruthlessly so many times and I feel all these times only Shaheer saved Dev. He brings such innocence in to this character which makes it's impossible to hate Dev. I think this is the best character that happened to him till now.

It's only been few hours that Dev knows Soha is not Jatin's daughter, so we need to cut him some slack. She could be adopted. He needs make sure and that is what he is doing by stalking!😆

Now my question is .. how much has Dev changed? What I saw from his interaction with Ishwari,

1) Even after knowing his Mom is telling lies, he can't confront her

2) He can't think of separating himself from his Mom

3) Some part of him still gets manipulated by his Mom ex. his declaration that he is unaffected by what Sonakshi does, with whom she marries etc.

Also we see how hostile Ishwari is regarding Sona. It is even worse than what it was 7 years ago

Do you think Sona and Soha can live happily ever after with all these constraints in Dixit house?

This question has been playing on my mind since yesterday but I didn't have the chance to come and respond here. It all worked out for the best because yesterday's episode gave me some fresh material. I think the things Sona said, like the dialogue you quoted above, came largely from her experiences with her own family. They gave her a model for what she wanted her own family and marriage to look like, but until she reached Dixit house and found herself in the midst of struggle to be accepted, I don't think she gave much thought to how that balance was achieved in the Bose family.

There is no doubt that Asha and Bijoy have a wonderful relationship, and have created a wonderful family together. But much like in any family, there were also little alliances that formed within the larger unit -- Asha and Saurabh shared a special bond, as did Bijoy and Sona. Saurabh idolised his mother thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world and repeatedly asked her why she had married a grump like Bijoy. In turn, he got a lot of her qualities; empathy, sense of humour, and a creative bent of mind that left him often indecisive about his life's path.

Sona idolised her father and his values of independence, excellence, and integrity and sort of dismissed her mother as the person who nagged her about eating right and getting married. Every time Asha tried to assert her point of view in Sona's life, Bijoy stood up like a barrier to protect the independence and autonomy he had so lovingly cultivated in his daughter. That's not to say that Asha and Bijoy didn't have a relationship with their children of the same sex, and the kids absorbed unconsciously a lot of the other parent's wisdom/censure, but those relationships were not as deliberate or self-conscious.

All this began to shift around when Dev came into the picture. For the first time, Bijoy's guidance was not enough to steer Sona through this brand new set of circumstances, but she continued to consider it the only way to do things. She kept trying to follow the path BIjoy's teachings laid out for her -- when she considered Dev's hasty hospital break-up to be the final word, when she agreed to get engaged to Ritwick -- and it continued not to yeild the satisfaction she wanted. It was at this time that Asha first realised how much her daughter needed her intervention, and the first time that Asha put her hand in to Sona's affairs, showing her how her baba's way of doing things had its own limits. And it did work -- it got Sona to see why her happiness lay with Dev, even if it went against her basic principles in some ways.

BUT her default way of thinking was always Bijoy's because that's what she grew up with. Opening up to Dev, showing vulnerability would have gone against this core tenet. Asha's intervention was new and therefore not as apparent to her. As we saw on the many occasions when Asha intervened, she needed to be reminded that it was okay not to be angry, and not to stand on principle all the time. And I think that is the crux of the Sona paradox. She wants what her family had, but she didn't fully understand how much or what kind of work Asha put in to make that possible because growing up, she didn't really observe the work her mother was doing. Her focus was all on Bijoy, and from what we saw, it looks like Asha too didn't assert herself until the situation was life or death for Sona's happiness.

From the beginning of the show, however, it has been apparent that Asha (with dadi's invaluable help) did a lot to keep the peace in their household, and in fact, compensated for a lot of Bijoy's shortcomings without him really knowing about it (Saurabh most obviously comes to mind). Similarly, there was a lot of compensation for Sona's reluctance to share her feelings, if not directly through Asha, through Saurabh and Elena. Even in Bose house, Sona was always closed off -- she usually went to her room and closed the door before she cried -- but there were people there who were willing to coax that information out of her. When she was the nutritionist, we saw her behave very naturally and that worked like a charm, but once she became the bahu, she became much more self-conscious about how to make people love her, and ended up going about things in much less organic ways. She tried to be an Asha while following Bijoy's rules and I think that is where she got confused about how best to fit in to the Dixit household.

I am not sure that had much structure, but if anything is unclear or incomprehensible, let me know and I will try to explain better.