Dear Friends,
You are probably as astonished by the title of this piece as by my sudden reappearance, like Lazarus from the grave. It feels rather like being buried, PR does these days, buried under a whole truckload of junk. So why have I turned up again, you might well ask.
Now in my old PR Today posts, I have, as many of you might remember, written with great warmth and affection, about Arjun Kirloskar as he was, and because of him, about Purvi as she was as well. I have rejoiced with them, worried with them, fought for them with more than half the forum, and mourned with them. But all that, alas, is long gone, and for a while, in my infrequent posts under this rubric, I raged at them for their follies, individual and joint, and at PR as a whole as it went steadily down the tubes. I am too old and too cynical to be anyone's fan, and I wrote what I felt, with no apologies for it being 'my POV absolutely'. Whose else would it be anyway?
By now, I have no energy left for raging at our amar premis, or even at PR. So I have decided to start laughing, not with PR, but at PR. And let me tell you, folks, such is the abysmal quality of the script these days that even making fun of the goings on takes a lot of effort. But it does me good, and maybe it will do some of you some good as well, so here goes.
Statutory warning: This series will be irreverent and written with tongue firmly in cheek, so all those still with stars in their eyes for the amar premis are forewarned: this is not for you. Nor do I have any intention of entering any more into long, repetitive and convoluted arguments over the merits of individual characters or their (mis)deeds. So, my dear friends, come here only if you want to join me in laughing at the comedy circus that is PR today.
I must also confess that left to myself, I would have posted these occasional takes on someone else's thread, as I did for the first two (which I am now posting separately for those who with a taste for pronounced satire). But a couple of young friends, Pallavi and Vasu, were kind enough to insist on stand alone posts. No one is immune to flattery, least of all myself, so I complied.
So now you know whom to blame for this infliction! I hasten to add that it will not be a daily infliction, which should come as some relief!đ
PR Today: Comedy Circus 3: April 26, 2013
Arjun: I learn that there is a sudden shortage of glycerine in Mumbai, and a look at PR today revealed why. The whole available stock has been used up by Arjun Kirloskar. Today, he cries from beginning to end, for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, but boy, does he cry! The sensitive New Age man, in short.
He cries as he watches Purvi weep all over Pari and smother her with wet kisses (someone should warn the parents of the cute baby who plays Pari against the very high chances of infection to their little angel from being smooched so often by all and sundry).
He almost cries with guilt when Ovi smashes the glass and cuts her wrist. He just stops short of crying gratefully all over Soham, who, being genuinely macho, would have rebuffed him in no uncertain terms if he had tried.
Then when Purvi is about to hand Pari back to him, he crinkles his eyes in teary anguish, and actually bats his eyelashes. No girl could have done it better, and I watched fascinated.
He stops crying briefly when Purvi, with the hapless Onir in tow, descends on the Kirloskar mansion, and plays the doting aai to the hilt, and the amar premis coo jointly at their progeny, their heads inches away from each other. The one who looks ready to burst into tears then is Onir, whose fifth wheel status was never more obvious. He is pitiable as he looks on cluelessly at his wife and her former(?) lover rejoicing jointly at their child. A bizarre scene, like something out of a French farce.
When he turns up at the Dutt kholi, and hands Pari back to her asli aai, he pulls out all the stops. Pari ko tumhari zaroorat hai, he declares in a quavering bass, with a quivering face to match. He is lucky that the wind did not change at that moment, or else, as we were always told in the fairy stories, he would have been stuck with that mould of Paternal Anguish (capitals intentional) for life. Or more to the point, for the rest of PR, which is a fate (for me) too awful to contemplate.đ
Finally, as DK, after having asked his son, who is so deep in his sorrow that he prefers to mourn in the dark, whether he could live without Pari (I could have told him that he was talking thru his hat, for of course Arjun intends to haunt the kholi several times a day to commune with his Pari, at least till even Onir's unbelievable tolerance gives way and he tells Arjun to take a walk), bowls a googly at him and insists that he must bring Ovi back home, Arjun opens the waterworks and sobs aloud. I could not make out why, till it dawned on me that the very prospect was so scary that he felt like a little boy in the dark, and reacted likewise.đ
This segment also produced the single funniest line of today, when DK, trying to get his son to screw his courage to the sticking point (apologies to Lady Macbeth), intones, with great emphasis, "You are a MAN!". The humour was of course entirely unintended, but nothing less aggressively masculine than AK today would be hard to find!
Ovi: She does not treat us, a la Purvi, to any high pitched melodrama, and even her single cutting remark about the wounds her apne have caused her is delivered with dignity, for which I was grateful. She later pleased me even more by arriving ' after she has lost a very good modeling contract because she is married ' at the entirely self-centred and stunningly practical conclusion that she should never have insisted on marrying Arjun. If only this wisdom had dawned on her much, much earlier! But then there would have been no PR, would there?
But now, what with this roadblock to her renewing her career, and DK's injunction to his son ' complete with the leit motif of a pavitra rishta that has to be maintained - it does seem as though Ovi will be wending her way back to the Kirloskar household. But her having apparently freed herself at long last from her fixation on Arjun will mean that she will not go back from a position of weakness and emotional dependence.
This prospect would explain the reports of rain sequences of her and Arjun; the PR CVs like familiarity in their scripts, so ArMan scenes were recycled for ArVi, and now apparently ArVi scenes will be recycled for ArOvi.
In these eco-conscious times, such a dedication to recycling is most commendable.
Purvi: She does not disappoint us, does apni Purvi. I wrote yesterday that the truth is, for Purvi , a foreign land that she avoids entering, except in the case of force majeure. I have since modified that view; I now think that she really believes the whoppers that she lets drop with such splendid insouciance.
Today, she tells Onir with a straight face that she had saunpoed Pari to Ovi with kitne vishwas, thinking hat Ovi would love her more than her own life. If I could have phoned in, I would have interjected at that point "Yes, she did, till she found out what you had been hiding from her! And when did you 'hand over" Pari to Ovi?.
Next, she declares, with no sense of any irony, that hamara nischay to give Pari to Ovi and Arjun had been very very galat. This stirs even the slavishly obedient and devoted Onir to protest, and he reminds her that he had strongly advised against the baby swap, but tumne meri ek na suni. I felt like standing up and applauding this tentative evidence that there were some vestiges of a spine in homis oniricus after all.
But his Mishti is unfazed, and she immediately plans to retrieve the situation by getting Pari back with her, at which point Pari does turn up like a bad penny. It was noteworthy that whatever Onir was thinking about this development, he was not jumping with joy, probably totting up all the likely extra bills and contemplating his empty pockets. And not without reason, as his first job seeking effort ends in total failure.
Onir: Apart from the unexpected mutation that resulted in a tiny spur of a backbone where there was none before, the interesting thing today was the evident and growing sense of alienation in Onir as, firstly, he watches Purvi and Arjun rejoicing with their child and shutting him out, and then again when Arjun leave s Pari with Purvi, with the (unstated) prospect of endless visits by him to the Dutt home. The tone in which he utters 'Arjun?' when Purvi says that Pari in missing him, is distinctly odd.
If this sense of alienation - sharpened by his having become, professionally, a pariah, with no work and no income - gets deeper and deeper, we might see a far more interesting Onir, jealous, irritable, and demanding vis a vis his Mishti. That would do both her and us a lot of good!
Last and the best: Pari: Purvi's offhand comment, when her magical touch now fails to quieten Pari, and her lori fails to make her sleep, that she must be missing Arjun, is as illogical as it is incorrect. Arjun's interactions with the baby, before he discovered who her mother was, were distinctly tentative at best. It was Ovi who was constantly carrying her around like a mother bear with her cub, as Purvi must have seen for herself. So now what Pari is missing is Ovi, who could not only quieten her but make her smile when she picked her up at the Kirloskar residence.
Plus, I have a strong suspicion that baby Pari has already developed a taste for the good life, with soft beds and AC.đ So she does not take kindly to the makeshift cradle (of the kind seen at construction sites with many female workers), or to the prickly, hot and humid surroundings.
Shyamala B.Cowsik
Bigg Boss 19
