Folks,
My mother, who watches Porus with me, and who has a great sense of humour, said, the first time she had a look at the Mahayuddh montage of Porus and Alexander, that they looked exactly like two angry rams, head down, ready to butt each other😆. I think her comment is spot on, but as there is no neat word for two rams fighting, I have settled for a cockfight for the title.
This is no battle royal between two lions, each king of his respective jungle, as the two of them snarled at each other as Alexander was leaving. The CVs are infantilising (if there is such a word) both Alexander and Porus with a vengeance😡. In fact the most apt simile for the pair of them is that of a couple of squabbling schoolboys repeatedly sticking their tongues out at each other. It is a decidedly juvenile affair, meant only for kids, not for discerning adults.
Their tit for tat is already getting to be boring, and it can only get worse. I suppose that this tu tu main main, and assorted other inanities, will continue till episode 250, at which point Alexander will abandon his current bridge building idea, and actually cross the river by a brilliant manoeuvre.
Then we will finally have THE BATTLE, and then the wrap up with appropriately solemn voice overs. Finis!!!👏
What I can't understand at all is how these two fighter cocks are to become not just friends, but allies as well.
Scripting follies: One, we are asked to believe that all the food supplies for the whole of Paurav Rashtra are stored in the capital, in a few sacks ready to be burnt!
The rest of the stuff set on fire looked like a rack in the store of Maganlal Dresswala, who used to outfit all the Bollywood movie stars in the old days. 😆
Two, that Alexander has an army of jewellers at hand to make all those gold fruit and rotis, plus the silver rice grains!! That too in a matter of hours. Pathetic nonsense😆. That is why I said once that this script belongs in Chandrakanta or Hatim Tai, or other such fantasy tales.
Three, that all these hijinks have to be executed personally by the principals. The fire has to be set by the Three Kings themselves. Porus and Paurav Rashtra should be flattered at this personal, royal attention! 😉Of course they escape before the easy going PR guards get the city gates closed.
I suppose one should count one's blessings that they did not make Alexander do the job. But I expect that he would have turned the CVs down flat, looking down his imperial nose at them, exactly as he did with the foolish receptionist at the Paurav palace who was trying to hand the entry pass to him. Alexander, when he wants to, can be supremely haughty, and why not?
Then Porus has to swim across and set all the Macedonian tents on fire with unfailing accuracy. Everything in Porus being superflammable, the whole lot catches fire at once and burns away to glory. It is CGI that is is to blame for these pyromaniac excesses.
NB: Clearly Hephaestion, who was supposed to be in charge of the logistics for all of Alexander's campaigns, was a whiz in geometry, for the tents are arranged with incredible regularity!
War is not a tea party: Inlieu was quite shocked at Alexander having actually destroyed the food supplies of the Paurav praja, and not taken them to his bosom as he did with the Persian awaam. She is just a bit off in extrapolating Alexander's attitude towards the Persians to the Paurav folk. There he wanted to establish his reign on the sound footing of popular acceptance. Here, he repeatedly says that the Paurav awaam will have to pay for Porus' fault (in insulting Alexander before them). So he has no intention of sparing them.
Besides, what he does is only a variation of the classic tactics adopted by a besieging army, of cutting off food supplies to the besieged, so as to starve them into surrendering. Of course the Paurav Rashtra can always access food supplies from its hinterland, but even so it would be a major hardship.
As the saying goes, Mohabbat aur jung mein sab jaahiz hai. Aur yeh to jung hai. What Porus did in Persia was part of a guerilla war, what Alexander does here is the same. As is what Porus did here last night.
It is all in the game, so to speak. Chairman Mao Tse Tung of China, who should know, once said that a revolution is not a tea party. Neither is war.
Not to worry. This being a Swastik show and not real life, the PR bhandar will be bursting tomorrow, fully replenished from the royal stores. The royal family can go on a upavaas for a few days 😉. Only Laachi should be excepted, for she is almost two dimensional already😉 and I don't want her to get any thinner!
And the Macedonian tents will also be all up tomorrow, as right as rain.
Mills and Boon fare: That is exactly what it was, the Alexander-Barsine-Roxanne triangle, and if it worked beautifully, it was not because of the ladies, Olympias of course excepted. She looked the best of the three, and was enjoying herself thoroughly, her deep set eyes gleaming with pure mischief, and indulgent amusement at her son's cleverness.
It worked also because it was such an unexpected and pleasant diversion from the ongoing cockfight.
To revert, Barsine looked like a petrified child, unable to believe that the Alexander who promised to turn her life into a jahannum on earth now seemed to have forgotten all about it, and was line maroing her with a vengeance. 😉 Of course her arrival in Takshashila was planned in advance by Olympias and Alexander.
Roxanne looked like a tea kettle on the boil, if you can imagine a tea kettle trying hard to rustle up an angry expression. Her expression was so stereotyped that it was not even funny.
Bacha kaun? Alexander, and he was a treat to watch. Flirting desperatedly with Barsine, looking into her (scared) eyes as he kisses her hand repeatedly with prolonged relish, his own eyes alight with mischievous glee. Leaning repeatedly towards the girl and lavishing attentions on her. Caressing her cheek and hair with his finger while proclaiming her the Miss World of the 4th century BC. Seeking his mother's endorsement of his offering the pearl necklace to Barsine, which is of course instantly forthcoming.
Then, once his ploy has worked to perfection, and Roxanne is saying Pehanyenge nahin? , he is now looking down into her eyes, his own lambent with suppressed longing.
Longing of which he will no longer speak, the broad hint in her Hamari pasand badalti hai notwithstanding. At least I hope so.
The look in his eyes as they follow the departing Roxanne is intriguing. There is no longing in them now, only a latent spark of mischief, underlined by the half smile. Roxanne's about turn amuses him, and I don't think he is of a mind to woo her all over again. In fact, I feel that he will continue to lavish attention on Barsine, to make sure that this badalao in his malika is made permanent.
Then again, he might also want to find out more about Porus from Barsine, always provided he can get her to open her mouth! 😉I hope he is not going to repeat his Porus ke kate hue sar ka mantra to the poor girl. She is scared enough already; it was pathetic to see her subdued response to Roxanne's harsh insistence that it was she who was the Shah's malika. Let us see.
An aside: Now both the girls to whom he has promised to gift Porus' kata hua sar are here at the same time. Is Alexander going to clone it, or like the woman in the story of King Solomon, is he going to cut it in half?😆
The raks: Normally, I would have been with Surbhi in condemning Alexander for even inviting his wife to dance before others. But then I noticed that there were other factors at work, and my reaction became less negative.
Apart from the fact that Alexander picks this way of riling his wife by asking her, not just to dance, but to dance in honour of Barsine's saalgirah, what needs to be noted is that, firstly, there are no outsiders present, Hephaestion and Cleitus being practically like family for Alexander (the latter seems determined to disoblige LuckySnow and not get killed by Alexander at all!😉).
Secondly, Roxanne's objection to the idea is, as she herself says, not because of the company present, but only because she does not want to dance in honour of a maamooli mohajir (refugee) Farsi. This being the case, I saw no further reason to be angry with Alexander on behalf of this woman.
The arrogance of this Bactrian upstart insulting a Persian princess of the Achaemenid blood royal was breathtaking😡. I disliked Roxanne from the beginning. Now I detest her.
She is a woman who knows only how to take, who is so ready to claim the rights of being Alexander's malika without bothering about any of the responsibilities that go with this haq. It was very amusing to see her so instantly insecure about, not Alexander's mohabbat, but about her postion and prestige.
How I wish Alexander marries Barsine right now! Roxanne's face would be worth watching!
Puru ke vachan: He once used to make long speeches. Now he is scattering vachans broadside to all and sundry, to Alexander, to Chanakya, and the latest to Laachi, that he will not let a single tear fall from her eyes from then on. Now Laachi is a very brave girl, so one can hope that at least this one vachan of Puru's will be fulfilled, thanks not to him but to her.😆
This said, that Puru-Laachi scene was charming. Laksh did quite a good job with Puru's stammering awkwardness, and of course Laachi, eyes full of mischief, was perfect .
Breaking news!: It became official day before yesterday. Sony Chanakya is now the self-designated assistant to Sony-Porus in the Akhanda Bharat Abhiyaan, which is also now copyrighted by the latter.
This is one for the history books!
Then, I didn't at all like the way in which they made Chanakya, the sharpest mind of his age, look so unobservant that he didn't notice all the work going on at the river bank as he came to the rajsabha, despite the Paurav Rashtra palace being right on the bank of the river. As a result, he looked and sounded like a peevish old man, not like a wise Acharya.
The renewed love fest between Chanakya and Porus thus looked force-fed and all too quick. Nor did it, for me at least, wipe away the disgraceful way in which Chanakya was treated earlier by the Paurav raj parivaar, though he himself seemed to have forgotten all about it in an instant. Oh well.
Finally, both Sony Puru and Sony Chanakya have abysmal Sanskrit uccharan. When Chanakya was reciting the mahamrityunjay jaap, I was taken aback by the really bad mistakes in stress and enunciation, and Sony Puru's Sanskrit is unintelligible. It was even worse when he was reciting something to Chanakya on the riverside than it was on Wednesday last, during their Grand Confrontation. I suppose the CVs are banking on 98% of their viewers being totally blank when it comes to an even rudimentary knowledge of Sanskrit.
Delayed felicitations: To Vaishnavi,👏 for having flagged a point that no one else here has done, not even I. I thought of it, as I always do when folk in these serials produce corpses out of the blue😆 , but I failed to mention it in my post. I am very glad that she has done it now on Inlieu's thread here.
This was as to the identity of the corpse that was passed off as the dead body of Porus, by him and Chanakya.The corpse had to be that of a Bharatiya, chosen so that the height and body build would match that of Porus. It could not have been that of a Macedonian or Persian, who would have had different facial features.
One hopes that Chanakya didn't murder some unfortunate Bharatiya chap in order to procure the dead body. He would not have hesitated to do so if there was no other supply available. 😉
This is it, folks. If you liked it, please do hit the Like button.
Shyamala Aunty/Di
Book Talk
