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Credit for this gorgeous banner goes to Maham (Allbut1)!
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I really liked the concept and editing of today's episode, the way they cut between scenes, maintaining a dialogue between all three simultaneously. That being said, overall it was too much screen time for Tayji given that it was the episode just after Yash found out the truth and we were all dying to see his reaction to it and the way he treated Aarti. An episode that I would have otherwise loved for its clever dialogues and editing, made me kind of impatient today. Then again, the big drama is usually saved either for Wednesdays or Fridays so this might have been setting the stage for that. With PV, it is always better to judge an entire week as one unit rather than each episode.
About Tayji, I find the message being given there is a really interesting one, about how men become regressive and entitled instead of really taking responsibility for their actions. It is a huge problem in India that the male child is given so much importance that they start to think that they are god's gift to their parents and feel no other responsibility but to exist. Today we saw a repentant Prashant, one who had heard Aarti's words and didn't want to cheat her anymore than he had already done. But Tayji with her insistence that he had done nothing wrong, convinced him too that everything that had happened was totally Aarti's fault. Tayji is also convincing him that Aarti is his wife, which she is not according to law, which makes Aarti seem like the cheater and Prashant the victim rather than the other way round, i.e. the truth. Even when Prashant's instinct is to be accountable and responsible, it is squashed by her words. Excellent message, yes, but she should be integrated into the story more. Right now she seems like a random addition taking up all the screen time.
Now to the best parts of the episode. I just love the way they are handling this truth revelation, especially with regards to Yash's reaction. He is of course completely shattered because he feels like life has cheated him again. He loved once, put all his faith and devotion into one human being and destiny snatched her away cruelly long before her time. Now he finally opened up to love and life again, only to find that it was all an illusion. And this is where the baba's words come into play because in truth, everything is an illusion, especially the notion that anything really "belongs" to us. Sometimes things we think are permanent turn out to be just an illusion: Yash thought his future with Arpita was a given, he could see it stretch for miles, certain and secure, only to find when she died that the illusion was shattered. The reason he reacted so angrily to Arpita's death, was that he felt something that belonged to him was taken away, and that is why he fought so hard to keep her with him even after she had passed on.
He had started on the same path with Aarti, building illusions of perfection and seamless togetherness, but once again the illusion was shattered... because Yash had not learned his lesson. He has yet to learn to look for the reality beyond the illusion, rather than building an illusion off the reality he perceives... and that is the journey called life that the baba was talking about: learning to see the reality beyond the illusion, learning to overcome the power of your own mind to see the truth. Yash has to clarify what Aarti knew a long time ago. Neither of them "belong" to each other or to their previous partners. It is only when you use that word that issues come up about who you belong to and how you can belong to two people at once. If you instead replace the word belong with love and commitment, it makes it so much easier to wrap your head around how this relationship between Yash and Aarti works. They were both committed to their previous partners, but for some reason staying committed to them as husband or wife became impossible, so they instead committed to each other as husband and wife. Being together is a choice they make every day, rather than some great ploy of destiny in which they had no hand.
Yash has finally started on this road, the first step being his confusion in the morning about how Aarti could worry about his tiniest pain and not care about giving him such a big wound. If only you could connect the two Yash! Just like she wanted to prevent the pin hurting you at the cost of hurting herself, she will protect all her loved ones at the cost of her own pain. The lie wasn't about hurting you, Yash, it was about saving the Dubeys. You were just the collateral damage.
There were two loop closures in today's episode. The first one was when Aarti laid her head on Yash's chest after she came home and found him sleeping. This was a throwback to when he was trying to confess his love and pulled her towards him as he fell asleep. In a way, Aarti herself resting her head on his chest, echoed the baba's words again. Even without Yash pulling her to him, she came and took the same place, close to his heart. This did not go unnoticed by Yash either. It was sort of along the lines of that "if you love something let it go" philosophy. Yash "let Aarti go" by pretending to be asleep and she came back to him. And that is what is keeping Yash from going totally crazy on Aarti again. On the one hand, he feels hopeless because he realises Aarti doesn't "belong" only to him, on the other hand, these gestures of Aarti's give him hope.
The other reference was to the pin incident. That time, Ansh planted the pin and there was nobody to protect Yash from the pain. To me this symbolises the difference between the Aarti-Yash and Ansh-Yash relationships. In the latter case, Ansh hurt Yash deliberately for wanting to kiss Aarti. Ansh wasn't ready to trust his mother with anyone else and so "defended" her by hurting Yash. In some ways, Ansh shared his pain, his premature adulthood and the unhealthy interdependence with his mother, with Yash that day, no holds barred. Similarly, Ansh was hurt in return, by Gayatri who locked him up in the room, and then by Yash himself when he forced him to go to school against his will, leading to the kidnapping. At that point it was like Yash was sharing his pain with Ansh, the pain of his inadequacy as a parent in Arpita's absence. They each experienced each other's pain profoundly and both of them began healing each other when the kidnapping happened. Yash proved to Ansh that he was the bigger man by saving him, and Ansh put down his burden of growing up too soon. Ansh proved to Yash that he was a strong and compassionate parent who would go to any lengths for his kid, to the extent of going against his parents and giving up his very life.
This is precisely what is not happening with Aarti. While she has lived Yash's pain with him through the post-Mumbai phase and been part of his healing, she has constatly "saved" him from her pain, just as she saved him from that hairpin today and for that reason, their relationship has never had the chance to reach its full potential. Today, even though Yash verbalised confusion at misunderstanding Aarti, I think he did understand on some level. He wants to feel her pain, to share it with her because no amount of pain is equal to her hiding something from him. He would rather have the pain Aarti is saving him from than the pain of knowing she doesn't want to share it with him. When the pin hurt her, he rushed to her, not able to see her in pain and she brushed it off with the explanation that she didn't want to cause him pain, have him get sick and have to get injections, almost as though indicating that he couldn't take it. Yash squeezing that pin was symbolic of him defying Aarti's concerns, saying that he could take the pain if only she gave him the chance by sharing it with him.
Sorry if this got abstract somewhere in the middle. I realise now that I look back at it, it got very rambly indeed!
About Tayji, I find the message being given there is a really interesting one, about how men become regressive and entitled instead of really taking responsibility for their actions. It is a huge problem in India that the male child is given so much importance that they start to think that they are god's gift to their parents and feel no other responsibility but to exist. Today we saw a repentant Prashant, one who had heard Aarti's words and didn't want to cheat her anymore than he had already done. But Tayji with her insistence that he had done nothing wrong, convinced him too that everything that had happened was totally Aarti's fault. Tayji is also convincing him that Aarti is his wife, which she is not according to law, which makes Aarti seem like the cheater and Prashant the victim rather than the other way round, i.e. the truth. Even when Prashant's instinct is to be accountable and responsible, it is squashed by her words. Excellent message, yes, but she should be integrated into the story more. Right now she seems like a random addition taking up all the screen time.
Now to the best parts of the episode. I just love the way they are handling this truth revelation, especially with regards to Yash's reaction. He is of course completely shattered because he feels like life has cheated him again. He loved once, put all his faith and devotion into one human being and destiny snatched her away cruelly long before her time. Now he finally opened up to love and life again, only to find that it was all an illusion. And this is where the baba's words come into play because in truth, everything is an illusion, especially the notion that anything really "belongs" to us. Sometimes things we think are permanent turn out to be just an illusion: Yash thought his future with Arpita was a given, he could see it stretch for miles, certain and secure, only to find when she died that the illusion was shattered. The reason he reacted so angrily to Arpita's death, was that he felt something that belonged to him was taken away, and that is why he fought so hard to keep her with him even after she had passed on.
He had started on the same path with Aarti, building illusions of perfection and seamless togetherness, but once again the illusion was shattered... because Yash had not learned his lesson. He has yet to learn to look for the reality beyond the illusion, rather than building an illusion off the reality he perceives... and that is the journey called life that the baba was talking about: learning to see the reality beyond the illusion, learning to overcome the power of your own mind to see the truth. Yash has to clarify what Aarti knew a long time ago. Neither of them "belong" to each other or to their previous partners. It is only when you use that word that issues come up about who you belong to and how you can belong to two people at once. If you instead replace the word belong with love and commitment, it makes it so much easier to wrap your head around how this relationship between Yash and Aarti works. They were both committed to their previous partners, but for some reason staying committed to them as husband or wife became impossible, so they instead committed to each other as husband and wife. Being together is a choice they make every day, rather than some great ploy of destiny in which they had no hand.
Yash has finally started on this road, the first step being his confusion in the morning about how Aarti could worry about his tiniest pain and not care about giving him such a big wound. If only you could connect the two Yash! Just like she wanted to prevent the pin hurting you at the cost of hurting herself, she will protect all her loved ones at the cost of her own pain. The lie wasn't about hurting you, Yash, it was about saving the Dubeys. You were just the collateral damage.
There were two loop closures in today's episode. The first one was when Aarti laid her head on Yash's chest after she came home and found him sleeping. This was a throwback to when he was trying to confess his love and pulled her towards him as he fell asleep. In a way, Aarti herself resting her head on his chest, echoed the baba's words again. Even without Yash pulling her to him, she came and took the same place, close to his heart. This did not go unnoticed by Yash either. It was sort of along the lines of that "if you love something let it go" philosophy. Yash "let Aarti go" by pretending to be asleep and she came back to him. And that is what is keeping Yash from going totally crazy on Aarti again. On the one hand, he feels hopeless because he realises Aarti doesn't "belong" only to him, on the other hand, these gestures of Aarti's give him hope.
The other reference was to the pin incident. That time, Ansh planted the pin and there was nobody to protect Yash from the pain. To me this symbolises the difference between the Aarti-Yash and Ansh-Yash relationships. In the latter case, Ansh hurt Yash deliberately for wanting to kiss Aarti. Ansh wasn't ready to trust his mother with anyone else and so "defended" her by hurting Yash. In some ways, Ansh shared his pain, his premature adulthood and the unhealthy interdependence with his mother, with Yash that day, no holds barred. Similarly, Ansh was hurt in return, by Gayatri who locked him up in the room, and then by Yash himself when he forced him to go to school against his will, leading to the kidnapping. At that point it was like Yash was sharing his pain with Ansh, the pain of his inadequacy as a parent in Arpita's absence. They each experienced each other's pain profoundly and both of them began healing each other when the kidnapping happened. Yash proved to Ansh that he was the bigger man by saving him, and Ansh put down his burden of growing up too soon. Ansh proved to Yash that he was a strong and compassionate parent who would go to any lengths for his kid, to the extent of going against his parents and giving up his very life.
This is precisely what is not happening with Aarti. While she has lived Yash's pain with him through the post-Mumbai phase and been part of his healing, she has constatly "saved" him from her pain, just as she saved him from that hairpin today and for that reason, their relationship has never had the chance to reach its full potential. Today, even though Yash verbalised confusion at misunderstanding Aarti, I think he did understand on some level. He wants to feel her pain, to share it with her because no amount of pain is equal to her hiding something from him. He would rather have the pain Aarti is saving him from than the pain of knowing she doesn't want to share it with him. When the pin hurt her, he rushed to her, not able to see her in pain and she brushed it off with the explanation that she didn't want to cause him pain, have him get sick and have to get injections, almost as though indicating that he couldn't take it. Yash squeezing that pin was symbolic of him defying Aarti's concerns, saying that he could take the pain if only she gave him the chance by sharing it with him.
Sorry if this got abstract somewhere in the middle. I realise now that I look back at it, it got very rambly indeed!
Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2
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