Originally posted by: sashashyam
It did not have to be Siddharth, Ranjana. He is too old now to play the kid Baji. Just as the CAS people found Siddharth from his Dhoom 3 and Mahakumbh stints, these folks should have looked around and found someone perfect for the 12-16 years role.Also take a look at the 13 year old playing Shani, and you will understand what I mean. The young Baji needed to dominate the scene. Can you see this one doing that? No.The young Baji needed pep and panache. Think Ranveer Singh onscreen; he was perfect in that respect. This one just does not have it. There is nothing about him that makes you want to watch an episode once more.If they had wanted a kid out of Malgudi Days for the early village scenes, they should have changed him before they got him to Daulatabad, or even earlier. He is simply not attractive enough or convincing enough. With that inverted casserole on his head, and looking about 4 feet tall, he was comic when facing that Mughal captain. 😆It was Rajat in PRC, Faisal in Maharana Pratap, Siddharth in CAS, and now Kartikeya in Shani who got the TRPs that kept those shows well placed for over a year in each case. Here it is the opposite.And all this preaching about Jo hati nahin wo Marathi nahin .. Marathi sar kata sakta hai, jhuka nahin sakta.. is getting to be very boring when it is repeated umpteen times. And Baji thinks of the latter pearl of wisdom when he is right in the middle of a life or death situation for the whole Marathi contingent in Daulatabad. Any astute kid would have bent over double saluting the captain in order to escape unnecessary scrutiny, but not our vainglorious Baji. Such foolish posturing!This is the problem with shows like this: they have to be hagiographic. There can be no grey shades. What to talk of grey shades, there is here not even any cunning of the kind that the real Baji must have been awash with .Instead, there is endless posturing and bhashangiri enough to rival Jodha Begum at her most vigorous!😉I did not like the way in which Radha Bai was literally apparated into Daulatabad a la Harry Potter. How the devil did she get there so quickly by bullock cart? Did they all fly over on magic brooms? It is nonsense of the kind I had not expected from a thus far superbly rational script. What was the need for her to turn up and pontificate about mathrutva at all?Plus I was very disappointed by the downturn in Balaji Vishwanath's good sense barometer. Was he planning to send both his head and Baji's in a box to Kamruddin, and then be confident that nothing would happen to the villagers? And what about the Rescue and Regain Daulatabad campaign he was supposed to be heading?Most relevant, since when has the life of a general been equal to the life of a common soldier or that of a common citizen? It is puerile, populist stuff that makes no sense at all.The deterioration has already begun. Mark my words. I do not think we need worry about the Mastani phase, for that is a long, long way off, and if the TRPs stagnate like this or dip even lower, we might not get there at all. I have seen how this kind of thing led to a collapse in Ashoka. It was unbelievable.Shyamala Aunty