22/8 Dragon Club : Kambakht Ishq :P

Today's episode looked like the workings of Ganpati's chamatkaar have started. Everybody who was harsh and unrelenting in the previous episode became softer and more forgiving today. Notably Gayatri. The Casanova was still at his encouraging best and the way he gave Aarti the prasaad and told her to keep faith was really good.

(At one point when the Casanova applied the tilak for Gayatri, I also thought he was acting a wee bit like a young romantic hero … maybe it was just my imagination?)

The whole episode seemed consumed by this dahi-handi scene and the way the Director introduced this flashback – by making Aarti look through the photographs of the Mumbai trip – was a nice touch. Initially when the servant brought the album and gave it to the Bua, I thought it was Aarti's diary! Thankfully, though, it was only a photo album! My stopped heart started beating again!

My theme for my analysis today is actually about Yash … you know, in this whole story so far the scriptwriters almost made us forget that Yash is a mature man of at least 30 years of age, going through his second marriage. Admittedly, he has been married before and has two kids, but in our minds – or in my mind at least – he still seemed like a "young man" till I myself was surprised we that boy who broke the dahi-handi called him "uncle". I can just imagine how Yash must have felt to hear that, because I guess he himself never looked at his age like that!

Which brings me to my theme: WHAT IS YASH'S PSYCHOLOGICAL AGE REALLY?

I feel compelled to analyse this because I have seen so many scenes so far where Yash seems "reluctant to grow up".

1. The way he loves Arpita is like the love of a young man to his college sweetheart. Can it be that Yash is unable to get over Arpita because he is unable to accept his own growth into a different man of a different maturity? Did he ever have a really mature love with Arpita, or were they like teenagers in love? It sure looks like a deep love when we see the photos on the wall, but when they show fashbacks of Yash and Arpita it is almost always about Yash playing pranks on her or the reverse. I cannot rememer seeing any flashback with any intense or mature passion.

2. The way Gayatri was able to call up old stories of his childhood and make him eat the food - that she was feeding him like a small child - was a scene that was almost absurd. The mother keeps calling her son "my baccha" and he meekly surrenders himself to her feeding him? In that scene, Yash was at one moment a small child transported back to his childhood by his mother … and the next minute he was shattering things from the dining table after seeing Aarti. Did he not look like a man reluctant to leave that childhood cosseting after seeing Aarti?

3. The way Yash handles the kids also is very reminiscent of a man who literally "goes down to their age" to play with them. He is happiest when things are uncomplicated, simple, easy and natural. At the slightest sign of heavy emotions he seems unable to handle things. Could it be that Yash is most comfortable only when Aarti does not force him to any relationship beyond the simplest friendship? Is Arpita the real cause of his fearing a relationship with Aarti, or can it be that he never had really emotional relationships with anyone, not even Arpita, and that could account for his keeping safe with Aarti also?

Sometimes, I find I am beginning to suspect that he has this thing called the Peter Pan syndrome, (it is a psychological state of mind where a grown person tries to revert to being young and carefree again). Can it be that Yash has those traits in him?

Psychologists say that some people who have this syndrome may either be suffering from some trauma that makes the want to revert to a painless childhood rather than being their real age. So a man of 30 years could well have a psychological age of just 20 years, if he has had some major setback in his life that has made him want to go back to a safer time in his life whe he was carefree.

Other psychologists also say that people who have this syndrome need not have acquired this after some trauma. In fact, they may be already having ths syndrome without knowing it and when there is some trauma in their lives, their coping mechanism makes them want to regress into their younger days.

I have no idea if all this applies to Yash, but today when that boy called him "uncle" I suddenly saw Yash as a man of 30 years often most comfortable behaving psychologically like a much younger person. His sudden moodiness, his emotional reserve, his under-confidence in some situations and his reluctance to handle the reality of his second marriage in the fullest sense suggest that he has some problem that is psychological. All this on top of having OCD… oh boy, what a mental tangle!