Why Karamchand 2007 is a letdown

I was waiting to catch the first episode of Karamchand, starring the carrot -chomping detective played with such freshness by Pankaj Kapur in the 1980s. The ads before the episode were full of tempting questions: Where had he been all these days, gosh! - 20 years? What had he been up to?

Unfortunately the questions were not answered by the end of the first episode. It tried to make it sound as if the intervening years had not happened at all. And that the leap of 20 years (that Ekta Kapoor strives to add in her serials) had never taken place at all. Kapur strives manfully to breathe the character back to life. However, too much water has flown under the Nizamuddin bridge for us to accept Karamchand back with the same fondness, as we had missed him.

First, Kapur looks old. The typical Karamchand mode of dialog delivery and hand gestures that made the 1980s detective seem so different, look depressing on this fifty-something detective. Of course, in the 1980s, we saw Jeremy Brett play Sherlock Holmes on Doordarshan too.

Karamchand was the exact opposite to Jeremy Brett's cool and composed take on the great detective (one of the best in an impressive list of actors to play the 221B Baker Street resident, IMHO). Karamchand would run out of exact words to say, a stark contrast to Sherlock Holmes, who always found the right words. Of course, it did not make him seem like a bumbling idiot, but rather as someone whose words could not keep up with his thoughts.

And then there was the carrot. In the non-health conscious 80's, Karamchand ate carrots - and I guess convinced a fair number of until-then dubious school children like me about the virtues of the vegetable. Popeye hadn't smashed his way onto the Indian TV screen to extol the virtues of spinach yet and therefore Karamchand seemed like a radical contrast to the pipe-smoking (and occasionally opium smoking) Holmes.

However, today Karamchand seems like an anachronism of that age; like VP Singh trying to make his presence felt in UP.

Kitty, for example - the new actress who plays the dumb assistant to the detective has little or no effervescence to not turn the character into a caricature. And the only thing she seems to be there for is to say the predictable last sentence to her boss "Sir you're a genius" to which he will invariably answer, "Shut up Kitty".

Or take Pankuj Parashar's direction. In the 1980's when the camera hardly moved, Parashar's unusual camera angles and use of shadows and lighting marked him out as a different talent. He took that talent to mainstream Bollywood too, with Naseeruddin Shah as hero (!!) in Jalwa (remember the giddy camera movements during the title song sung by Remo Fernandes?) However, the same camera angles look childish today.

In all, the context has changed but sadly by the look of the first episode, nothing much by way of content has changed on Karamchand. The second coming of the detective does not take the show to another level and therefore disappoints one even more. All that it has done, is awaken our memories of the past and make it more painful for us.