Posted:
I'll be honest. I'm a person who loves stories. I'm also a person who likes shades of love stories if they emerge...and is absolutely okay with it when they don't, as long as the story captures my imagination and makes me think about the issues it raises. I love even more when a love story is sketched such that I feel it's still tied to the story and the theme, and isn't just a love story for a LI's sake. When the heroine doesn't simply take a look at the arrogant hero doing a nice deed in secret and go head-over-heels in love...but has that love grow over a series of things that lead them to know each other well, I leap for joy. When a male romantic interest for the heroine has better things to think about than how to make the heroine in love with him, and the heroine develops a friendship with him at her own comfy pace, I fall flat for them already. Or maybe that's just me.
In this case, I love RaghavI as a couple mainly because I sense so much freedom in that relationship. The CVs never forget that Sia is stuck in a victim mode, and will be so for a long, looong time (except for the times when they make her a mahaan heroine who wants to solve everyone's problems đ) and is therefore - while naive - never able to blindly trust men, at least, the way she once used to. For some time the question remained as to what it meant when Sia eventually found herself clubbing Raghav with the main women in her life -- Geeta, Komalika, Alka...how was she able to trust this man so strongly? I think it's because she's had her chance at mistrusting him and thinking the worst...and to Raghav's credit he has never once forced his presence/friendship/feelings on her.
It also lies somewhere in how her impressions of Raghav compare with those of Viraaj's -- and I say this because Viraaj is the benchmark on which she measures men. Her fear of all men springs from the implicit suspicion (confirmed further by what Mr. Awasti tried to do) of 'well, this man seems nice, but so did my husband when I first met him and look how that turned out.' In Viraaj's case, the mistake she made was in automatically assuming that he was a wonderful man from the very start...which she does only because she wants to believe that he's as good a person as he looks. Within that relationship, he breaks that trust, after which he cuts back all her options, so that eventually her only choice (if one can call it that) is to either stay, or risk her life and sanity trying to escape. In short, I think he forces her to accept him, rather than treating her as an individual in her own right, with a choice (of course, given his background this is how he views all women, as lesser beings who should be kept in control lest they betray you...examples being how he answers the other battered wife he briefly encounters in Delhi). The relationship there is clearly a hierarchy, and even when he does gain her trust, it is through an illusion that compells her to believe he has changed -- in my opinion another method of coercion. In short, her trust in him is never earned, only her obedience. Even in the ML track, that cycle repeats given that even this time he's creating an illusion to make her believe that he has memory loss, and that without his past he's a different person. An act he'll drop as soon as they are alone together in Manali ('no more Mr. Nice Guy', anyone?)
Jhanvi measures Raghav on that benchmark and begins by seeing Raghav as untrustworthy, even dangerous. She starts out thinking the worst of him, and Raghav at this point is too busy in his own problems to really bother doing anything differently. That's what I love...that whatever steps are taken towards any level of trust are ultimately her own, taken because she wants to take them. When he breaks into the Awasti house to return her phone, he doesn't do anything more than return it...but her realisation that he was genuinely trying to return it only emerges when she goes to the fruitseller herself and confirms...ergo, her own choice to find out whether this one incident can really challenge all the things she has seen him do already. When he tells her to fight against the gundas herself he is still the one giving her a push, and he is still the one to end the fight, but it still gives her a chance to gauge for herself her own inner strength and that a person like Raghav believes in self-empowerment. Even when he arranges her ashram stay, he is firm about her not knowing. For me that's always meant that if they are to remain friends it should be because she chooses to, rather than because he wants her to.
And I love the fact that she doesn't have feelings for him even now...that her feelings are still strictly platonic. I'd like to believe that if/when Sia does have feelings for Raghav, it will be through her own free will and because she feels she is completely ready for a relationship. I like that the CVs are still building a solid foundation (Krish, the punching bag, Jhanvi keeping herself safe by staying mum -- NOT her trying to fix the Singh family's complicated relationships)...because I feel by the time there is any relationship of any sort she will be sure of being an equal in the relationship.
Raghav's feelings for her do complicate things, but how they have developed him was instrumental to me in their story as much as Jhanvi's development has. He's seen her as she is -- a person paralyzed with fear -- and has, prior to their developing any sort of friendship, just dropped advice whenever he sees her facing a problem. I don't think he's ever really taken for granted that she might like him back...because for him his focus is that she would have a roof over her head, safety -- which he, rightly, thinks she lacks, and doesn't exactly have the means to attain (given that all her certificates have been burned and that she has very little recommendation for a job besides the women who grow to trust her and give her a job on that basis...like Alka and Gayathri, and she hadn't stayed long enough in the ashram to start out a small endeavour of her own like some of the other women did) and a chance to fight for herself...a chance she takes only on occasion probably because she takes a looong time to feel ready to do so, and because her confidence levels are abominably low. End of the day, the endpoint of whatever they have between them is that one day, when she's ready, she will be free from the cage she's built for herself.
Yep, that's what I love about them đ
PS: If there was just one thing I'd change...it would be that I'd like to see more of Jhanvi as a person, more of how her thought processes develop -- look at the progression of yesterday's punching bag scene where she goes to that room on her own and slowly, simmeringly...starts feeling betrayed and hurt and angry and frustrated...no Raghav urging her and telling her, no Geeta urging her to leave, no Komolika urging her to start over, no Alka or ashram didi telling her to develop her strengths. Just her, a punching bag and her own boiling-over pot of emotions...
Udne Ki Aasha
O Humnava Tum Dena Saath Mera
Haven For Her
Anupamaa
