Folks,
This one is not going to be as short as I had hoped it could be. Yudh is getting to be like the Hampton Court Palace maze; the narrative twists and turns till one feels dizzy, and sits on the edge of the chair, body tilted towards the TV speakers so as not to miss the least throwaway line in Yudh's husky baritone. And one stares hard at every face so as not to miss any nuance, as when Dharmendra Malik and Nikhil face each other across Mamta's funeral pyre.
No one can say any more that Yudh is too slow, and it was never easy going! But what a treat, this show, every single time!
A tour de force: If I had to pick just one standout sequence last night, it would be the attack of breathlessness that Yudh gets just after he has finished briefing Anand about his illness.
The sudden bending of the torso when he can no longer manage the weight of the briefcase, and the crashing down behind the desk with the limpness of a rubber dummy. The hands clawing frantically at his collar as if that would clear the passage of the air to his tortured lungs. The thrashing about of the whole body as Anand and Cindy struggle to get him up. The mouth contorted as he articulates an urgent order to call Dr. Mehra. The sweating forehead, the face drawn and gaunt as the breath labours in the lungs. The eyes sunk deep into their sockets, almost colourless.
Watching Yudh, one is almost as breathless in empathetic suffering, and on the verge of reaching out into the TV to help Anand and Cindy lift him up.
And finally, after the emergency medicine has been taken, and Taruni has given Yudh the injection, patting his cheeks afterwards in anxious solicitude, his face and body alike are limp with both physical and emotional relief. For a daughter's instinctive and tactile affection is something new for Yudh, and thus all the more heartwarming.
In this scene, Amitabh Bachchan went beyond anything I have seen him do onscreen so far, and I have seen almost all his films, even the lousiest. He was a revelation, proof positive of the adage that old wine is far better than a new vintage, or even its own early youth!
Unquestioning trust: Before that, the way in which Anand cross-questions Yudh and coaxes the secret out of him was delightful, with Anand's possessive protectiveness towards his boss and the no holds barred camaraderie between them. Plus the pawky, unexpected sense of humour the normally dour Anand reveals, with his crack about a nuclear formula or an alien virus.
Not to miss is the instant compassion and empathy on Yudh's face as Anand explains that he watches SF films about aliens with his son Aditya. But then that is Yudh all over, witness his declaration, towards the end of the episode, that he would not have CCTV cameras installed inside the office: Mere saath kaam karnewale mera parivaar hain. Aur main apne parivaar par nazar nahin rakhta.
Noble and generous, but not either prudent or wise. I was reminded of Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, both the one in Jodha Akbar and the real one, who cut their traitorous relatives far too much slack, to the detriment of not just their own lives, but of the lives of their people, the awaam. Here too, Yudh has so many rotten eggs around him - in his family, beginning with Ranjan, and of course in his firm as well. So such well-meaning and blind trust can and will be damaging not just to him, but to the firm and the 10000 whose lived depend on the firm's wellbeing.
It is good that Yudh has now agreed to get the lawyer in and sort out the legal liabilities angle linked to his illness. From this to holding a press conference as suggested by Taruni will be but a step.
Daddy's girl: The open affection between Taruni and her dad is wonderful to behold. When she says, with a yearning in her voice, that she wishes she could do something to make things easier for him, and he talks of what she had done for him the day before, a slow, glad smile lights up her face. And when he decides that she will be his doctor till Dr. Ganatra is back, the smile broadens, to match Yudh's own grin of paternal pride in his strong, resourceful and capable daughter. Inside, they are both so much alike, Dad and Daddy's girl.
A corollary of love and caring is the fear of loss, the loss of the loved one. So much so that after studying Yudh's medical reports, the normally resilient and optimistic Taruni almost collapses for a while, to the dismay of her boyfriend Abhir (?). As she looks at the report, her face, without any visible physical movement, still somehow reflects the panic that has set in. For this was the father she had longed to know for all her life, and as she says, now that he is there, "it is too late".
That is the downside of being a doctor, and a good one. One cannot kid oneself that all will be well in the end.
Taruni's tedi chaal for getting hold of Yudh's medical report furnishes one of the very few genuinely light-hearted scenes in Yudh so far. The young couple are so natural and so comfortable with each other - right down to his naughty quip about the dinner to the cheek kiss she gives him after he has pulled it off - that the freshness of their romance is heightened, not reduced, by the total absence of the formulaic lajana sharmana etc. And Abhir's fake British accent is spot on, and very, very funny as well.
The first bloomers?: There were two points here that seemed to be goof ups, the first ones I have spotted in this show.
One, Abhir is calling from a local number, but saying that he is calling from Queen's College, Birmingham. How is it that the girl in Dr.Ganatra's office does not notice this? Nowadays, all landline phones have a caller id display. He should have been shown making the call on skype, thru the internet, but that might have seemed too complicated for the audience, even the kind that Yudh attracts.
Secondly, the girl in Dr. Ganatra's office would have e-mailed Yudh's report to Queen's College, Birmingham; she would have their e-mail address since she must have been doing his travel arrangements. How then does Abhir access the report from his office? Unless he was able to hack the Queen's College e-mail account of the person who he was pretending to be, the main contact there for this conference. This seems too far fetched, for Abhir is a lawyer, not an hacker, ethical or the other kind!
Yudh's worse half: Nayantara shows her claws in this episode, whether it is her unconscionable rudeness to Taruni or her asking Anand, with appalling crudeness, that if Yudh has to bear all the strain and tension in the office, what is he, Anand, being paid for.
Anand handles her with near comic aplomb, and Taruni simply ignores her peevishness. But I could not understand the reason for such insecurity in Nayantara, for her behaviour towards her husband's legitimate daughter, who surely has some claim to his affections, is clearly rooted in a deep-felt insecurity.
This surfaces again when she tries to get Yudh to hand over all his work to Rishi. Even without Yudh's immediate, and well-founded putdown, it should surely have been clear to anyone with an IQ of 60+ what would happen to the business that Yudh has built up with so much effort if Rishi was left to play at ducks and drakes with it.
I will not accept the pat explanation that it is mother love at workđĄ. That is a slur on mothers at large; I am one myself, and I know perfectly well what my son can do, which is an awful lot, and also what he cannot.
The fact is that Nayantara probably knows in her heart of hearts that Rishi, her pride and joy, simply does not have it in him to succeed Yudh, and she also probably suspects that Taruni does have it. No wonder she is shown, in the precap, lapping up Ranjan's conspiracy theory (which sounds like something out of the Mel Gibson film of the same name) about a connection between Dr. Mehra's accident and Taruni now having become Yudh's doctor. I am waiting to see her explode when Yudh, at the end of the press conference, announces that Taruni will be the CEO of Shanti Enterprises henceforth. That will be one for the record books!đ
The bug in the tower: Anand, with characteristic acuity of understanding, grasps at once that there has to be a bug in the office, and then of course they locate the (imported) device in the jazzy Leaning Tower of Pisa. The ideal location, right next to Yudh so as to catch even his husky comments. Anand vetoes the idea that this could be Dharmendra Malik, and I would agree. So who then? Let us try our hand at this latest Who dunnit?
There is first the person who has commissioned the bugging expedition, and then there is the executor.
The former can be almost anyone hostile to Yudh at the moment, beginning with Mukesh Chhabra. But then, if he had got to know of Yudh's mortal and debilitating illness when Yudh tells Anand about it, why then it would have been Breaking News on his channel the same evening. He could not have used the report stolen from the crashed car of Dr.Mehra, for that would have tied him directly to the perpetrator of the crash, and got him into trouble with the law. But he could have flashed the bare news, as a scoop, across his news programmes, in an attempt to destroy shareholder confidence in Yudh's management of the Shanti Group of industries. But nothing of the sort has happened.
Is it Nikhil then? He hates Yudh, on mistaken grounds, but fiercely. But how? Is he so techsavvy? This bug is a real high end professional job. Plus, when he lands up at Malik's in the precap, he looks clueless, and helpless enough to look for help from a man who must detest him, and who is, moreover, a sinking ship
I would veto the cunning and sleazy Municipal Commissioner, though he seems to be a general favourite here for the Villain No.1 slot. He does not hate Yudh, and while he has been backing the Maliks for purely pecuniary reasons, he is now pretty much convinced that they are incompetent losers. Moreover, Anuj Malik is likely to be in jail for the foreseeable future, and Dharmendra Malik was furiously accusing the Commissioner of having failed to stop Anuj from proceeding with his harebrained scheme against Yudh. The Commissioner must have seen the prospects of any further income from the Maliks drying up totally.
Whence the warning to Dharmendra Malik not to try and drag his name into the mess Anuj is now facing, under pain of being ruined. Kay Kay Menon is marvellous as he delivers this savage threat without raising his voice in the slightest, or contorting his face to convey fury. A class act.
The Municipal Commissioner is now probably getting ready to jump ship and get himself back into Yudh's good graces.
So where are we? Precisely nowhere, and that is the fun part. Do try your hands at this, folks, I would love to see what all you come up with!
As for the executor, provided he is quick and technically savvy, and the optimal location had been identified ahead of time, it would not take more than a minute to plant a wireless bug in the tower.
It could be even the guy with the room freshener. There must have been some reason for his having been shown barging into Yudh's room without knocking. In this show, there will be no pointless shots, or sequences. Not even the apparently meaningless ones about Mona and her sister Manju. Maybe Manju's AWOL hubby Kapil is somehow mixed up in our witches' brew !
Mona? I think not, though she is a recent recruit, for she has not been shown to have any technical capabilities, and that is what would be needed here. So the field is open for this puzzle as well. Go to it, folks!!
The funeral puzzle: The look that Dharmendra Malik given Nikhil right at the end of that sequence, after he has removed his glasses, was very odd. I watched it three times back to back, peering at it so closely that I almost fell into the TV screen, and it still remained a conundrum. The shadows of the leaping flames from the burning pyre, and the dust haze in the air, made it harder to make out, but it did seem to me that in the last shot, after Malik raises his lowered head and looks across at Nikhil, there was the faintest trace of a smile on his lips, or at least of a relaxation of the muscles. And his eyes were still and deep, not furious as one would have expected.
Are they somehow in cahoots, I asked myself. There is no answer to this as yet, and I would not rule the possibility out just because of the scene in the precap. Malik might well be saying How dare you come here? , for the consumption of the onlookers. Let us see how this goes.
Old shoe love: The truncated scene between Anand and his wife Preeti was redolent of the kind of gentle, deep affection that comes from a marriage of long standing, which has gone thru a great deal of good and bad. The kind that Mira Nair, in her delightful Monsoon Wedding (which won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival), calls "old shoe love", not showy, but snug, like a comfortable pair of well used shoes. Preeti's voice, when she denies that what she sought was more time for herself, was heartbreaking in its inarticulate sorrow.
Professional integrity: This is for Kavita, who detests the sleazy methods favoured by Mukesh Chhabra, desperate to dig up some dirt, no matter what, on Yudh. She reins in her gutter-raking junior colleagues, and has the guts to stand up to her boss and question his facts, and by inference, his unprofessional motives.
But it was odd to see her asking him how he knew the car that hit Dr. Mehra's was one owned by Shanti Constructions. Why, that was announced on another news channel right after the accident! The car was clearly deliberately abandoned at the accident site solely to let the investigators make this point, fuelling the kind of speculation against Yudh that Chhabra's channel is broadcasting.
I wonder why Yudh does not sue the channel for slander. He can do so at least after the press conference!
As for the night watchman at the Shanti Constructions site from which this car was taken, his being asleep was an absolutely familiar motif!
Precap: Apart from the parts of it that I have already covered, I cannot make anything out of the overturned autorickshaw, which turns turtle because a woman in it is struggling to get away from someone. Mona? In an autorickshaw? Not impossible in a crisis situation, and then she is declared untraceable, so maybe it is her. Suspense, suspense!
So that is it, folks, and I am sorry to be so late with this one. I could not begin it till 4 pm, but anyhow, here I am, at least 4 hours + before the show begins!
Shyamala B. Cowsik
Sports
Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2
Hollywood
Hindi TV Shows
Love Friendship Dating and Relationships
