Folks,
Those of you who are Holmesians will immediately understand the "why" of this title. But for the others, please see the section below, The Moriarty factor.
Let me now start with the three best scenes last night. Unsurprisingly, all three are with Yudh!
Tours de force:
-The Angry Old Man: One, Yudh raging against the perfidy of Dr. Mehra's son Rahul, the totally concocted story about Yudh and Dr. Mehra that the shifty-eyed, unsavoury looking young man is peddling to the TY channels, and also about Mona's mysterious no show just when she is needed the most. So furious is he that he smashes his mobile, and then, for good measure, overturns the centre table in vintage Angry Young Man style (now a bit old, but the fire inside is undiminished!) . Nayantara - who has just been brushed off by Yudh for her hesitant and oblique opposition to Taruni being asked to look after Yudh till Dr. Ganatra's return to India - stands there petrified.
Amitabh Bachchan was marvellous in this display of anger on the verge of going out of control, but not quite. A little later, as Yudh sits there breathing heavily and erratically, he looks for his glasses and puts them on (good thing that he has not smashed them as well!). That seems to be his mood changing technique, for he at once looks calmer.
-The Gordian Knot: Yudh with Taruni and Anand, as Anand argues vociferously against Yudh's decision not to use the video footage inculpating Rahul Mehra of blackmarketing banned drugs stolen from his father's clinic. (I presume they were strictly-by-prescription-only drugs, not "banned" ones. If they had been really banned, how could Dr. Mehra have had them in his clinic?).
There is a Gordian knot here, for Yudh will not make the video public, which means that he has no way of proving his innocence of the charges against him made by Rahul Mehra, and this in turn will mean that he will continue to be crucified in the media for the near future, leaving his reputation irreparably tattered.
When Taruni, like Alexander the Great with the original Gordian Knot (please see the historical footnote below), cuts thru this tangle by pointing out that they can get rid of their core preoccupation with keeping Yudh's condition secret by going public with it, Yudh's reaction is wonderful to behold.
First, as the wisdom of her suggestion dawns on him, a smile, at once pleased and admiring, lights up his eyes. The lips then smile in tandem, and he reaches out to grasp her hand with his long, supple fingers.
In the warmth of that grasp, all his love for this bright, affectionate, protective daughter of his flows out to Taruni. What was special about it is that it was not Alok Nath style protective paternalism. It was Amitabh Bachchan style affectionately admiring paternalism. ____________________________________________________________________________
NB: 333 BC: Gordium. Phrygia: Alexander of Macedon, later to be called Alexander the Great, faces the incredibly complicated Gordian knot that had, for centuries past, tied an ox cart to a pole in the palace of the former kings of Phrygia, then a province of the Persian empire. An oracle had prophesied that the one to untie the knot would become the king of Asia.
Alexander surveys the knot, and realizing that no conventional methods would work, slices it in half with a single stroke of his sword, producing the required ends. This was the "Alexandrian solution" for the intractable problem of the Gordian knot.
The oracle's prophecy was fufilled, for Alexander did go on to conquer Asia as far as the Indus. But not India. ____________________________________________________________________________
-Agonising revelations: Yudh at the press conference. After a fluent and dignified opening statement, when he gets to the core issue, his voice becomes totally suspended. For a long, agonizing moment, nothing happens, and Anand and Taruni both look tense, almost frozen with worry. I almost thought Yudh had, as Dr. Ganatra had warned him, lost the connect between thought and speech.
Then Yudh finally finds his voice, and it is thick and tormented as he drags the words out one by one :Main beemaar hoon. It is like a door being clanged shut. The deep baritone camouflages the finality of this statement, its explosive quality. And as the episode ends, he starts struggling again for the will, and the words, to finish saying what he wants to say to the world. It was a marvellous take on his deep reluctance, and anguish, struggling with his will, and being defeated in the end.
-Let me add a fourth, not quite in the same league as these three, but very striking nevertheless. This is Dharmendra Malik being called from the jail and told that his son Anuj has been murdered there that evening. He will not believe it at the beginning, for this, the loss of his only son, is his worst nightmare. But the caller persists, and Malik's voice explodes in a crescendo of anguish: Kaise? Kyun? The voice breaks as he almost sobs Mera beta... Mera beta..The caller disconnects even as Malik is clinging to the phone and seeking more details.
It was a bravura peformance by an actor who, for those few moments, managed to transcend the limited scope of his character, and to dominate the screen by the sheer force of the emotions he was able to project.
Unexpected positivity: Ok, now back to the narrative!
We had two, no three pleasant surprises last night, when characters whom we had slotted into convenient stereotypes broke free, and did things that were totally and happily uncharacteristic of them.
-First there was Nayantara, bluntly dismissing her brother Ranjan's attempt to link Taruni with Dr. Mehra's accident, on the premise that she had gained from it. She thus proved me wrong, for I had noted in my last post, while discussing her sense of insecurity vis a vis Taruni because of her frantic concern about Rishi's future, that :
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.
-Next, again about Nayantara. She has the decency to apologise to Anand for, as I had noted the last time "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." Her apology is complete and sincere, and reflects well on her.
As for me, I am always happy when characters trip me up by turning out to be, at least for the moment, much better than I had expected them to be! It is another matter that by the precap, Nayantara is back to her usual self vis a vis Taruni. But why does Taruni, in Nayantara's presence, behave as though she is apologizing for her very existence?đĄ After all, she is Yudh's daughter!
Thirdly, Dharmendra Malik brushes off Nikhil's attempt to make common cause with him against Yudh. He is not, at that point of time, concerned about anything but getting his son out of jail in one piece. Plus he is not endemically hostile to Yudh as Nikhil (for totally wrong reasons) and the mystery man (of whom more later) are.
It is another matter that after Anuj is murdered in the jail ( a crime planned by the Municipal Commissioner, worried that Anuj might blab and implicate him in the plot against Yudh; but Malik clearly now believes, however illogically, that it was a supari given by Yudh ) , the bereaved father takes over. And Dharmendra Malik becomes a willing tool of, no, not Nikhil, but of the mystery man who uses both Malik and Nikhil as his tools in his campaign to bring Yudh down.
Beti to beti hoti hai: Taruni's fierce loyalty to and protectiveness towards her father come out splendidly in this episode.
While I am at it, let me clarify one thing about which some are still doubtful. Taruni is Yudh's daughter from his first marriage to Gauri. She is thus 100% legit (though I believe that all children are legitimate; it is the parents who are legitimate or illegitimate). Gauri is put off by Yudh's obsession with success and his workaholism, and they drift apart and get divorced. Yudh later marries Nayantara, the daughter of a powerful politician, for pragmatic reasons, and Gauri marries Jeet.
To revert, Taruni is as anguished as Yudh is at the relentless tirades against him on TV. She takes no holds barred panga with her boyfriend (or fianc, seeing how comfortable he is at Jeet's dining table?) Arjun (well, that was it sounds like now; earlier it sounded like Abhir!) and, using impeccable logic like a fencing sword, drives him into a corner for daring to consider the possibility that Yudh could be implicated in the accident and then death of Dr.Mehra. And it is admirable that she does not use sentiment to defend Yudh, only persuasive logic.
Later, when Arjun tries to explain to her, quite logically, the cleft stick in which she now finds herself because of her loyalty to Yudh, she will have none of it. He argues that she will end up getting hurt whether Yudh is a paragon of integrity, for then his death will shatter her, or whether he betrays her trust, in which case she will never be able to recover from the blow. Arjun's solution for this Gordian Knot is for Taruni to distance herself from Yudh, though he does not say so in so many words. He receives a predictably hostile reaction from a departing Taruni.
For her, all that matters in that her father is beleaguered by malignant enemies, and most important, he needs her. This is what always appeals to us womenđ; we love to be needed. I remembered the George Bernard Shaw heroine , Candida, who dismissed the lovelorn poet who adored her, and chose to stay with her dull, phlegmatic vicar of a husband, and why? Because he needed her more than the poet!
Taruni is shaken very badly by the murder of her autorickshaw driver by a sharpshooter from a passing car, but she will not miss the crucial press conference that was her baby, and which is vital for protecting her dad's good name. Poor Arjun is shut up summarily and made to drive her to the PC venue. My heart goes out to this hapless young man. His fate is sealed; he is clearly going to become a prize joru ka ghulamđ.
When Yudh is going to make his speech at the press conference, Taruni is there, watching him like a hawk for the slightest sign of any trouble, of any attack like the earlier one. She is scrutinizing every twitch of his facial muscles, every sideways glance, every sentence and every pause. As he struggles for control, it is as if there is an umbilical cord linking them, and her face reflects the strain in his. At that moment, she is more mother than daughter, with the eternal instinct of all mothers to protect the child they love against the whole world.
The Mona angle: Mishti, you are quite right and there is a queer angle to the relationship between Mona and Kavita, which is what gets Mona, entering into this affair with visible reluctance, what she wants. Which is the silencing of the Daily News witch hunt against Yudh. But that is shown so ultra-discreetly that not many would make it out. Which is just as well.
But this Vibhishana is not able to deliver in the end, thanks to Rahul Sharma. And Mona is, unexpectedly overpowered in her car by a mystery man, and thus goes missing for the crucial press conference. I was unable to make out anything of what a struggling Mona was shouting at the man or of what he said to her, then and later, in leering triumph.
So I am completely in the dark as to that whole passage, except for what Mona was telling Anand in the precap about the attacker having taken away her laptop and her mobile, which contained confidential information. But taking the show as a giant jigsaw puzzle, I would hazard the guess that the attacker was Manju's missing husband Kapil!
Incidentally, I do not understand why the director does not make sure the sync sound is at least reasonably clearđĄ. Not every viewer can be expected to rewatch the show to make out the nuances, and every slurred or poorly audible line invariably says something very important. Plus, when the scene shifts, the audio of the next scene starts 10 seconds before the video starts up!
The Moriarty factor: Professor James Moriarty, the arch enemy of the iconic Sherlock Holmes, was visualized by the author of the Holmes stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as the brilliant mastermind behind every daring and big crime in 19th century England.
The most fascinating thing about him was that he had a perfectly respectable public persona, he was a Professor of Mathematics at a British University. Though he sat at the center of his web, like a spider, and controlled hundreds of petty criminals who did much of his dirty work for him, none of them knew of him or had ever met him. Only a very few trusted aides knew his real identity. Eventually his organization was destroyed by Holmes, and Moriarty himself died when he slipped and fell into the Reichenbach Falls in his climactic confrontation with Holmes.
To revert to Yudh, the parallels between Moriarty and the mystery man (MM, for short) whom Anand, and now Yudh suspect of being the real manipulator behind all that is going wrong with Yudh, are unmistakable. Both are mysterious and untraceable. Both manipulate men like puppets and make them do their bidding, and none of these puppets knows anything about them.
Once Dr. Mehra is safely dead, MM calls Nikhil and makes him get hold of Rahul Mehra and use him as a Brahmastra against Yudh.
He just might also have used the Municipal Commissioner to get rid of Anuj in the jail, by making an anonymous phone call and citing the threat to the Commissioner from Anuj. He thus brings a devastated, revenge-seeking father, Dharmendra Malik, and all his financial resources, to Nikhil's aid. It is the Malik lawyer who coaches Rahul Sharma to make those devastating statements against Yudh. And, I am sure, then gets the recording of the interview sent to Mukesh Chhabra as well.
It is not clear how and why the MM orchestrates the murder of the autorickshaw driver. To frighten Taruni away from Yudh? Remember Arjun's despairing comment that everyone who comes close of Yudh runs into danger?But that is not very convincing.
MM was clearly behind the kidnapping of Mona, to get hold of the confidential stuff on her laptop and her mobile. It is also surely he who got that fancy bug planted in Yudh's sanctum sanctorum.
Plus he is the one who killed Mamta or had her killed, not to get at Anuj, but to try to implicate Yudh in the whole mess.
So MM is brilliant; resourceful, has an excellent grasp pf human psychology and human frailties, and is very likely not an outsider re: Yudh and his business empire. He has lightning reflexes, witness the speed with which he was able to get a Shanti Constructions car to ram that of Dr. Mehra at a few minutes notice. (I was delighted by Anand's astute move to get that car reported stolen in a backdated FIR!).
Most important of all, he has a visceral hatred for Yudh, for reasons unknown as yet, and a burning desire to destroy him totally. It is a lethal combination.
I only hope that when we come to the end game, our Moriarty is not a disappointment! It is a very tricky exercise, trying to create a convincing mega villain.
Shyamala B.Cowsik
Kabhi Neem Neem Kabhi Shahad Shahad
Love Friendship Dating and Relationships
Tum Se Tum Tak
Financial markets and global economy
Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2
