Dear Hotdogg,
I would agree almost in toto with your reservations, especially those I have marked in
blue. The way in which the Udi baba first lugs the kid Rudra away from the mela site without even bothering to find out if his parent(s) is/are still around was highly irresponsible, even criminal. Even worse was the way in which he casually decides to lug the teenage Rudra back to Prayag without a word to the woman on whom he dumped the responsibility of raising the kid for 12 long years. Or bothering about the boy's feelings, or about the credibility of the so-called agency trying to unite lost kids with their parents. They could just as well have been a criminal gang trafficking in children. And why would the parents have taken 12 years to start looking for their lost kids?
In real life, the Mahakumbh, attended by over 30 million devotees, is a marvel of impeccable organisation that has been studied in depth by the Harvard Business School. Lost kids at the Mahakumbh are dealt with at once and reunited with their parents. No longer can the Kumbh mela be made the staple route for Hindi film directors to make their hero a temporary orphan.😉
Then there the mismatch in the age of the boy. The child Rudra looks about 6. 12 years have passed. Then how come the teenage Rudra is no more than 14, if not less? Chronologically, he should have been a much more grown up 18. I can see that the writer was stuck with the 12 year leaps and could do nothing about them. I also see that if the child Rudra had been 2 years old, they could not have shown him remembering what happened to his father on that pontoon in 1989. But there could have been a way out of that for such a clever and resourceful young man like Utkarsh, one of the 2 writers of Mahakumbh. As it is , the teenage Rudra look 4/5 years too young.
Regardless of all this and the Keystone Kops like "organisation" (the head is not a Cardinal, for then his cape would have been crimson. He has a black cassock and a red sash, so he must be a bishop), I thoroughly enjoyed this show till now.
The direction is spare and striking, and the lines are the more telling for their being so minimal. There is more of silences that speak than of words actually spoken, which is absolute miracle on our TV!
The casting director seems inspired. Not only in the choice of Saraswatichandra to play the adult Rudra, and the ever competent Seema Biswas, but also in the real discovery - the teenage Rudra. With his eloquent eyes and his silences that speak more than words, his sombre, brooding persona, like a young Heathcliff out of Wuthering Heights, and his spectacular athleticism. I have never seen such a thrilling rooftop chase as the one where he outruns his pursuers and ends up back with his initial rescuer. No wonder he is, I learnt here, going to play the young Asoka. I was taken aback by the extent to which the boy has changed and evolved from his touching, playful double turn as Sahil and Samar in Dhoom 3 .
I loved the hidden similes in Rudra's escape from captivity- with Samson when he pulls down the pillars in his prison, with the infant Krishna when he drags the broken pillars after him, just as Krishna dragged the mortar to which Yashoda had chained him.
As for the Dan Brown comparison, though he does a huge amount of research (much of which is fiercely contested by his critics), he too depends on a very fast placed plot to hide the glaring improbabilities in his tale. Just consider the opening segment of the Da Vinci Code. You have Jacques Sauniere, a man who has been shot, and is dying, and what does he do? Instead of trying to leave a message written in his blood, he strips, arranges himself in a copy of the Vitruvian Man. Then follows a series of impossibly abstruse clues, and an endless chase from crisis to crisis, with an unbelievable shadowy organisation working down the ages to pull down the Catholic Church. And the writing is flat and pedestrian. But sill, the book is a fantastic read, if only because of the roller coaster ride of the plot, which has 6/7 page chapters for the most part, almost each of them ending in a cliffhanger.
All these secret society/ organisation books are about the same, from Alexandre Dumas' Joseph Balsamo series about the Freemasons to Dan Brown and his Illuminati. I am sure they have mostly been best sellers! The only example which really scared me was the one in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the original, older movie.
They are ALL striving for world domination, and here for the other human obsession, immortality. The idea of living on and on and on, alone while the rest, including all whom you care for, die off around you, is a frightful prospect, but the human obsession with eternal life persists. As Steve Jobs noted "Everyone wants to go to Heaven, but no one wants to die"!
And the villains in the various superhero series invariably call for a substantial suspension of belief, whether it is the ones in the Superman series or Spiderman's Dr. Octopus. But yes, my namesake's Unbreakable was in a class apart, which is probably why it became a cult favourite.
Shyamala B.Cowsik
Originally posted by: hotdogg
Arshi...
I would rate Rudra's friend / wingman and the Head of the Syndicate (Priest) as key characters too..
Went through the first week episodes..
While I admit its too early, this seems to be going more the way of a Indiana Jones meets Man of Steel (Indian istyle) caper than a Dan Brown one...Dan Brown works have a fully researched and nuanced narrative, while an Indiana Jones work is more of a swashbuckling, fast paced narrative with enough holes in it, which the fast paced narrative makes us forget
Consequently, I personally felt it a bit disjointed from the narrative perspective...
1) Rudra as a small kid is not yet too small to forget his father / at least remember the name of the place where he lives / family etc. (He can identify a gun on the kidnapper, but cannot state his hometown or full name!)
2) Udii Baba guy simply picks him up and takes him around cross country or inter state without asking him about where he came from or even attempting to contact his relatives later, forget about trying to trace the parents at the kumbh post the accident. That is highly strange and bordering on the criminal.
3) Same with the MaiMui character.
4) The small kid also just goes with the flow...no reaction at all at being seperated from his father...even though he remembers the entire incident of the seperation including that someone kidnapped his dad..
This just did not work for me at all.
5) The villians are all caricatures...from the various swamis to the Head of the Syndicate.
There is no ominous feeling when they are presented.
The greatest contributor to success of this show, where the protagonist is a superhero will be with an antagonist who is equally powerful. The fundamental Law of Comic Book Villian as stated by Mr. Glass in the end scene of Unbreakable still holds true. The greatest super villian to the super hero is the exact opposite. (Case in Point Pramad & Saras).
If the show is choosing to show an organization and not a specific person as the supervillian...then it has probably exposed too much of this and it seems that the people who run it appear weak caricatures and most of all amateurs...Their amateurish actions just do not match the resources and power they seem to represent.
For e.g. they send just 2 local thugs to kidnap the father and that too from a kumbh mela, which is just so easy!...then to capture this father they do a silly blowing up the ponton bridge exercise (as if it becomes easier to kidnap a guy from a stampede of thousands or millions)..then they get this father out of country (since they are very 'powerful') and keep him locked up for 12 years and yet can't get the information out!!! ...Obviously they wont get it from their school boy torture attempts...and then the passive father suddenly gets the idea after 12 years of flicking that nail and easy weasy he's out... For a powerful syndicate the holding cell is pathetic..
Consider the show Lost where the shadowy organization running the Others was built up so masterfully that there was a sense of menace just when it was mentioned...it was built up by only referring to it in the begininng and keeping it in the shadows for 3 - 4 seasons...so you as the audience never know how much had it infiltrated in the good guys!...Or for that matter even in Dan Brown's works, the organization is kept hidden and just referenced.
6) Lastly there is so much similarity with Man of Steel...right from the foster parents who are afraid for their son because they know he's different and harbors a secret they will never understand, to the sullenness of the hero because he knows hes different...right to the scene itself when Rudra saves the astrologer...In Man of Steel its a bus, but which gets pulled up entirely the same way as the boat gets pulled up here...
I am assuming the love interest will be a desi Lois Lane following up on the exploits of Rudra...
So its too early for judgement...but I think if its structured like an Indiana Jones, then there is a great flaw because of its episodic nature..the audience gets time to think and revisit and where the flaws in the narrartive become apparent...They need to build up the momentum like Lost did and keep lots of shadows and not expose amateurish villians this early.
Cricket
Jhanak
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