This title would fit both literally and figuratively. The cloud effects we were shown this week were good enough for a documentary on El Nino, and the goings on at the terrestrial level would have sufficed to throw both most of the characters, and viewers like myself, into the throes of a depression.
This despite a few bright spots: a couple of exceptional scenes with, who else, MB, and her two young men, and the dramatic improvement in Rudra's character graph, which in turn enabled Gautam to put up a very good show.
Loose ends aplenty: However, overall, the impression I got was of a script that has overreached itself in terms of complexity - they are actually adding new characters even at this point, 3/4ths of the way down the road! I hope I am wrong, but I am almost sure that the end game is going to be confused and messy, with any number of loose ends lying around unattended to.
Let us just make a list of these loose ends and/or holes/oddities in the script, in no particular order, and you will, I hope, see what I mean. They are not all equally important, of course, but they are all irritating. What is worse, whereas in the early episodes, the questions that came to mind in one episode were sorted out in the next one or a little later, of late, the writers not only fail to clarify anything, but they do not even seem to realise that these bloomers and crossed wires exist, and they are in fact adding to them at a brisk pace!
But before we get to that, here is my Take 2 for this week, to make up to you, my gentle readers, for all that is to follow! 😉
- The great sacrifice: I absolutely loved this scene, and not for the special effects!
I loved it for MB's almost brutal candour in pointing out all the dangers to his future effectiveness in the mahayuddh that lies ahead if Rudra now gives up his sword (anything less like a sword I have never seen, but let that pass!) to tackle the current halahal threat. She has always been blunt and straightforward with him, not only teaching and guiding him, but pushing him to decide for himself, and to do it right. This time around, she surpasses herself.
I loved it even more for the clear-eyed courage and the quiet firmness with which Rudra makes his choice, and the reasons for which he makes it, set out in such lovely lines.
Hamare liye amrit ki raksha ka matlab hai maanavta ko jeevit rakhna. Agar aaj humne yeh tyaag karke is zeher ko phailne se nahin roka, to hum yeh ladaayi aaj hi haar jaayenge. Isliye hum apni talwar ko tyaagne ke liye tayyar hain... Jeevan se badhkar ne humein koyi ladaayi hai, ne koyi jeet. Faisla le chuke hain.. Balidaan hoga.
Gautam was perfect in this sequence, especially at the very end, when MB praises him, her eyes warm with pride in her shishya, for having shown the world that rakshak wo nahin jo shastra se lade, rakshak wo hai jo mrityu ke andhere ko mitakar jeevan ki nayi subah le aaye. As she caresses his head, he looks up at her, his eyes reflecting, not triumph, but the calm contentment of a duty well done, and the satisfaction that he has done it with her at his side.
-Brought to heel: Now this was one for the record books, and by "this" I mean both the MB-Dansh scenes this week: the first when he arrives with Drish to find her levitating, and the other when she shooes him off to go and see what is wrong at the Mahakumbh and try and tackle it. Priceless!
Of course MB was tops as always, but Dansh too was no slouch. Rahil did an good job of portraying a Dansh who is perennially on the defensive, so much so that he took all of MB's taanas without blowing his fuse, and fell in line with her hectoring order that he should go and tackle the crisis at the Mahakumbh, this with surprising readiness.
Which only goes to show that Dansh is, above all, pragmatic, and it is his burning need for the teesri kitaab that governs his behaviour towards MB. That, and the consciousness of being in the presence of a woman who is his superior in every way - in knowledge, in tactics and in sheer, calm determination.
In the first scene, it was side-splitting to see Dansh waiting, eye on his wristwatch, for the meditating MB to open her eyes, and then finally asking her to aankhen kholne ka kasht karein as he has something important to discuss with her. He is then, in quick succession, forced to confirm that he is now ready for the sauda, and then given the bad news that Rudra is alive after all.
Even for this, MB makes him and Drish ask her what she means by two good things having happened. And finally, having noted cryptically Wo zinda hai, she immediately closes her eyes again, merely nodding when Dansh exclaims, half disbelievingly, Rudra?? And as for their anxiety about the teesri kitaab, she brushes that aside with a cool Sahi samay aane par aapko pata chal jayega! This is what is meant by keeping the upper hand!😉
All this was great fun, but it was the second scene that was truly superb. For one thing, MB was tense and almost angry, and she snapped Dansh's head off when he was exclaiming about the new, post the Ganga-mein-vish crisis, adding, in response to his exasperated demand for clear answers, that only samay could give such answers, and he would have to wait for that.
It was when Dansh started on his by now standard refrain: Kitaab kahan milegi?, that MB really blew her fuse.
Kitaab jab milegi tab milegi, par saamne jo qahar toot raha hai uska kya? Kahin aisa na ho ki amrti nikalne se pehle hi sab khatam ho jay. Koyi kuch bata nahi raha hai isliye haath pe haath dhare baitha rahega Nag Pramukh? The contempt that was revealed by the way she stressed the last two words was sharp and unmistakable. More was to follow.
Amrit ka tabedaar ( dawedaar?) kehta hai na khud ko? Aur aise kisi ki ungli pakad pakad ke amrit tak pahunchna chahta hai? Ja, jaake dekh kya ho raha hai Mahakumbh main. Ladke dikha us mahasankat se!
No one, but no one, would ever have dared to speak to Nag Pramukh Dansh in this tone and in these terms. But he took it all without a word, turned on his heel and left for the Mahakumbh. That he never got there, being side-tracked by his unexpected encounter with the Guru Emeritus is besides the point. The plain and simple fact is that MB has brought Dansh to heel in no uncertain manner!
Now for the afore-mentioned loose ends and/or holes/oddities in the script, arranged in no particular order.
- The new Sacred Riverine Troika: I am afraid I am repeating myself, but I could hardly leave this one out of such a list!
Rao's Mississippi, Colorado, Nile et al is really the worst bloomer so far, for it knocks the stuffing out of the core concept of Mahakumbh, that once in 144 years, the amrit surfaces at the Mahakumbh at Prayag, when the vilupt Saraswati becomes prakat, and nowhere else. I do not know whose bright idea that was. Not Utkarsh's, I hope!😉
The funny thing, which you would all have noted, is that since that electrifying (for us!) scene in the car when this grand revelation was made by Rao, there has been no further reference to this new Sacred Riverine Troika. Maybe the writers have simply forgotten that Rao ever said this to Greyerson!😉 But if not, methinks this idea is only going to make confusion worse confounded, for there is no time now for gallivanting outside India chasing this track!
- A dubious hathyaar: Maya being kidnapped, at second hand, by Rao , one does not know what for. He claims that it was as a hathyaar for his future use. But Rudra is with him as of now, so why this potential lever for blackmail? Once Rudra the Garud Pramukh knows what Rao is really up to, no lever will work on him.
It is like that old saying, Pooth sapooth to kyon dhan sanchay, pooth kapooth to kyon dhan sanchay?
NB: Did Rao really get hit in the head or was that too a staged affair? If the latter, the foot soldiers in the Rao team must be quite bright, to hit him with just enough force to draw blood but not so much as to really hurt him!
- A dismal lot: The still powerless garuds, 55.56% of whom no longer want these powers, having been transformed into a bunch of scaredy cats all set on abandoning their mission, thus abandoning the amrit to the nagas, because Shivanand is afraid of dying. If Dansh could hear them, and I am sure he would have had he not been busy pampering the Naga Guru Emeritus, he would be chortling in glee.
As for Rudra, this must surely be the unkindest cut of all, to see his beloved Baba reduced to an arrant , devious coward, who wants not just to run away himself, but also to make the other garuds welsh on their duty. He will then finally realise that his Maimuyi was right about Shivanand being the carrier of the dar ki bemaari jo naagon ne use di hai, a bimaari which he has now passed on to 3 other garuds, thus emasculating the garud ranks. And that he, Rudra, was horribly wrong,
The doughty Thappadiya Mai gladdens my heart, and when she cursed Charles as a narak ka keeda, I applauded. She is the sole bright spot in this depressing garud set up, an ordinary woman who is not afraid to face the enemy to fulfil her duty as a garud, with or without any special powers. Atta girl!👏
Naagbali or no naagbali? :Now comes a key question. Shivanand had announced to Rudra, in a sort of trance, that a naga would have to die for a garud's shaktiyaan to become jaagrut. Whence the intra-garud squabble, you would remember, about Leela as a candidate for this bali.
I had then assumed that with the death of the Veshes' Guru Maharaj, which would surely qualify under this rule, that naagbali would have made at least one garud's powers jaagrut. But no such thing has happened. They all still seem to be not only shaktiheen but dimaagheen as well!😉 I think the writers have forgotten about that bit. 😲
Giving the CVs the benefit of the doubt, Shivanand was either wrong, or he was making that announcement under external influence. But as the only visible external influence on him is that of Dansh, this makes no sense, for why would Dansh incite the garuds to attempt naagbalis? So if Shivanand was so badly mistaken, what does that mean for the garuds, seeing that he is still their dimaag?
Not that the failure of his prediction was a bad thing, for seeing how destructive Shivanand is at present without any special powers, think of how much more dangerous he would be if he had those powers!
Nayi jaagruti!: Now along comes Rudra the Garud Pramukh, proclaiming that he will now awaken all their powers. How come? Presumably MB has taught him the procedure.
This announcement of Rudra's knocks out Tiwari's excuse about their not being fit to tackle the dangers ahead without those shaktiyaan. But Shivanand is dead set on these powers not being activated, for that would be contrary to what that voice in his head, which has been programmed to benefit the nagas, is saying. Presumably the brainwashed trio will follow suit, whence the melee in the precap that gladdens Dansh's heart, for this is what he has been planning all along, for all the 7 garuds to fight among themselves and self-destruct (he had then not reckoned with the satveen garud!😉).
I hope it does not take till Episode 92 for the errant garuds to see the light and come around! For now, I too am looking forward eagerly to seeing Rudra land a juicy left hook on Shivanand's chin today, and then beat up Charles and Tiwari as well. I always felt that MB's drastic techniques for clearing Shivanand's brain and blood, unpleasant as they looked, were a case of the classic a stitch in time saves nine kind of situation.
All or none?: Shivanand tells his prize acolyte Katharine that unless the 7 garuds are all together, they cannot fight, and so, with no yuddh, they will escape death. Even earlier, we have been told, though not in these terms, that total garud unity is vital for their success in their mission. But we have seen, on the ground, that only two garuds have been fighting, and fighting successfully even if temporarily, to protect the Mahakumbh and humanity as a whole.
I do not know about you, but as of now, I cannot see the remaining garuds, bar Shivanand who is in any case a dead loss without drastic detoxification, doing even a fraction of what MB and Rudra have accomplished and can accomplish in the battles to come. The power gap between these two and the rest is just too great.
The real enemy?: Now this is a curious question. One had assumed that the greatest threats to the garuds would be from, in that order, the nagas, Rao, and the Veshes. Which was why, when the Ganga ran black with vish, one looked around for one of these usual suspects to be the culprit. So, incidentally, did the nagas and the Veshes, and as for Rao, he seemed to be out of the running for this one at least.
Then it turned out that, as the Naga Guru Emeritus was mumbling to himself among the fearful crowds, the halahal was bound to come, as it had done the last time, 144 years ago, as part of the natural order of things in the samudramanthan.
MB is the only other person who knows of this, Shivanand does not, nor does Drish, which last is surely curious!
So who is the real enemy? Niyati? No, niyati cannot be the enemy of mankind, so I suppose she is simply testing the Garud Pramukh! Or else, this is one of those inexorable, impersonal sequences of events that samay calls forth, like the one in which our sun will, in due course, expand and swallow up all its planets in the process of becoming a red giant star.
- The enemy within the gates: ie Shivanand, going one better than even Dansh in sabotaging the mission of the garuds. This is the cruellest cut of them all, for I adored Shivanand, and see what he has become now!😭 All for lack of a few more hard blows from MB's staff!
I would have minded it less if he had stuck to his weeping and wailing routine, for all that it set my teeth on edge. But the cold, calculating deviousness - his eyes look as icily dispassionate as those of a professional contract killer - with which he is systematically corrupting the minds of those whom he should have been mentoring for their life's mission is awful to behold.
It is as if an alien soul is looking out from Shivanand's eyes, like something out of the cult film The Invasion of of the Body Snatchers. 😡
This cannot be the Shivanand who was strong enough to withstand the worst torture for 24 long years. And can anyone be really asked to believe that he has become what he is now just because of the naga vish? He was nothing like this while driving the shav vahan, with all the vish already inside him. How then can this changeling have taken his place?
Shruthi attributes his present rigid insistence, that all the garuds should run away and save themselves from a horrible death, to the same ego that earlier made him insist that everything should be subordinated to the mission, that Rakshakon ke parivaar nahin hote. One can agree with this up to a point, but I come back to the same question: how did Shivanand become so chronically imbued with the urge for self-preservation, something totally alien to his nature, just because Dansh and Drish yelled into his ears about his death by burning? It is simply not credible at all.
- MB's sauda with Dansh: The most vital and tricky issue of all, about which she has not yet informed Rudra, and which she appears to have put on hold for the present to babysit the Garuda Pramukh. Poor, foolish Dansh, imagining that his guards can prevent her from leaving! But then he has not yet seen her apparate, only levitate.😉
I have no idea whether MB is taking this sauda seriously, and if so, how she intends to checkmate Dansh's inevitable attempt to double cross her. If she does intend to abide by it, and to force him to do so as well, is she going to try for the inconceivable, a grand entente cordiale between the endemically hostile races of the nagas and the garuds? While also checkmating Rao and the Veshes along the way?
I would not put it beyond her, and I am holding my breath and hoping for the best.
-The elusive teesri kitaab: This is by now beginning to remind me of Alfred Hitchcock's the McGuffin, something touted as tremendously important that everyone is after, but which is really mithya, like the nuclear secrets in Notorious or the Maltese falcon in the film of the same name.
If MB is bluffing about this Third Book, why and for how long? If she is not, and there IS such a book, will she really give it, or explain its contents, to the nagas? The garuds of course are nowhere near thinking of any such Third Book, being as yet not even up to deciphering the Two Books.
I must say, however, that the ancients seem to have known a thing or two about book-binding. The Two Books, dumped in odd places and having the dust blown off them in large clouds from time to time, thrown into a fire by Drish and rescued from it by Rudra, and now lugged around in MB's jhola, still seem to be in mint condition!😉
-Determinedly literal: This refers to the literal transposition of the tale of the samudramanthan to 2013, right down to the halahal. This part is more Mahadev than Mahakumbh, and it seems, from MB's apocalyptic pronouncements, that she expects the halahal to descend again by the time Mahashivaratri and the amrit come along.
Presumably MB will then play a portly Parvati to Rudra's Neelakant 😉, there being no other candidate available. I am on edge to see who gets to play Mohini!
The current scenario would seem to indicate that, with the samudramanthan parallel being taken so literally, the amrit is not going to be esoteric right knowledge, as Shruthi and some others felt, but real amrit in a kalash. And in any case, no one could share any right knowledge with the Naga Pramukh, seeing that he is impervious to good sense! 😉
-The Great Amrit Bonanza ??: Rao must be having his test tubes and retorts and spectrometers all ready to analyse the amrit sample and then duplicate it. But how will he convince his potential clients that it is the real thing? Only by drinking it himself, and then having a second appointment with them after 50 years or so, by which time most of them will be dead anyway!😉
- A plenitude of Babas and balis: This is really getting to be too much. One has heard of one step forward and two steps back, but here we have one Baba finally disposed of and two more appearing out of nowhere!😉
The numero uno is of course the Naga Guru Emeritus, whose super elevated status is confirmed by Dansh's anxious attempts to make up for his solecism in trying to run him down on the road (the way in which the Guru immobilized Dansh's SUV was very amusing), especially his shashtaang pranam and that followed.
I was horrified when the Guru then produced an icky forked tongue of a length that would surely qualify it for the Guinness Book of World Records, and dunked it into the bowl of milk that Dansh was holding out respectfully, eyes lowered.
I begin to think Arvind Babbal has a forked tongue fetish, but that does not mean that he should periodically inflict such things on an unsuspecting audience!😲 If I wanted to see such spectacles, I would go to NatGeo for something on chameleons, not to Life OK for Mahakumbh!
The oddest, and in a way the funniest part of that scene was the Veshes goggling thru the curtain at the Guru Emeritus' tongue, which seemed to terrify them, for reasons that are easy to understand.
For they, on their side, are now clinging to the hope that one more sadhu baba will help them control the nagas.. He seems to have turned up, with so much hair over his face that it looks like the latest fashion in veils.😉 And no matter that he nearly puts paid to Balivesh, their aastha in him remains unaffected
Now, the rub is that he too wants a bali for the vidhi directed at the nagas to be successful. The question to be answered is whose bali, and that seems to perturb Devesh considerably, which makes it all the more puzzling.
In any case, balis are currently as abundant in Mahakumbh as the Babas. I await clarification about this one, in the hope that it does not go the way of Shivanand's naagbali idea.😉
Odds and ends
-The prostrate naagin: Leela, jisne khatiya pakad li, all for donating 3 drops of blood! I had no idea naagins were so delicate. Then there is the question of whether Dansh discovers what she has done to save Rudra and gets after her, though I doubt if he and the writers have time for such odds and ends!😉😉
-The mysterious naagmani: What would you bet that, after having Leela make that throwaway statement that it was his naagmani that forced all the other nagas to obey Dansh without question, the CVs have forgotten about this as well?😉
It would have made no sense anyway, for if he really has such a thing, why would he have allowed Drish to dethrone him so summarily, even if only temporarily, and take over all his naag vansh ke adhikaar? What was the naagmani doing then?
- Drish's tunnel, which he seems to be neglecting in order to hang around Dansh and MB. If I know anything of workmen anywhere, the tunnel is likely to end up in Sector 34 instead of Sector 53! 😉Why, when they were digging the Chunnel under the English Channel, the tunnels from the two sides ended up, at the mid point, with one 3 metres higher than the other!😉
Given all this, I cannot bring myself to condone all the cumulative follies of Utkarsh and Arvind Babbal just because Mahakumbh is, even now, better than the usual soaps. They talked of giving us a special, sophisticated show, and they have to be measured against those standards. When this is done, they have failed. When you claim to be much better than the rest, and end up like this, you have only yourself to blame.
Lastly, where is the TRP-driving angle at all? Mahakumbh has always had poor TRPs, and it is a finite show, so how can they tweak it to make it crowd-pleasing? And why should they even try that? It would be like a Bharatanatyam dancer suddenly attempting a striptease to attract wolf whistles!😉
On which caustic note, I am signing off for the week.
I am not touching on Maya at all, for reasons that would be readily comprehensible! I was a tad alarmed when she recovered so promptly with a dose of Rudra's now vish kendra vish-heen blood (thanks to those 3 drops of Leela's blood, remember?) , thus negating Leela's earlier assertion that only that vish could restore Maya to normalcy by neutralizing the poison in her blood. I forgot to add this to our loose ends/oddities list, where it clearly belongs, so please consider this done!
My hopes are now pinned on the sachcharine Maya staying kidnapped, and no more precious telecast time being wasted on showing her writing weepy letters to Rudra or mooning about him. Not that I believe that my hopes are about to come true!😉
Shyamala B.Cowsik
Ye Hai Mohabbatein
Writers Corner: Books, Stories & Poems
