PLUS: Ishita Sengupta reviews TVF's Hello Bachhon, streaming on Netflix
We Will Always Have Mona Singh
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The industry may still be figuring out how to write female characters past a certain age, but Singh’s “second innings” is a masterclass, writes Swetha Ramakrishnan
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ONLY AN ACTOR LIKE Mona Singh can have multiple “seeti maar” dialogues in a show like Kohrra (season 2), a deeply disturbing and unsettling series that doesn’t shy away from spotlighting grief, gore and violence. In one of my favourite scenes, Singh’s Dhanwant Kaur tells Inspector Garundi (Barun Sobti) that the case they’re working on is getting complicated because the murdered victim is tedhi (twisted). Garundi replies in the typical way men do, “Jananiya toh tedhi hi hondi ae (women are usually twisted).” She claps back moments later, “Bande vi kuch katt nai honde (men are no less).” It’s worth noting that Singh has built a rare mid-career language of restraint (even as her characters can be expressive and humourous), whether it’s in shows like Ba***ds of Bollywood and Kaala Paani, or playing big roles in films like Border 2 and Laal Singh Chadha. There's a lot of chatter about how she's reinvented herself; her graph from TV’s darling in Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahi to playing a Goan don in a film like Happy Patel is worth studying. However, her being back in the limelight at this stage points to something much larger, and more insightful. Singh’s recent run of performances rarely announce themselves. There are no grand monologues, no scene-stealing breakdowns. Yet, the emotional architecture of the story often rests quietly on her shoulders. Kaala Pani, Laal Singh Chaddha, Kohrra 2, Happy Patel, Border 2: these are patient, not flashy, performances. And they have left an indelible mark. |
| | Hello Bachhon Is Product Placement In The Garb Of A Series
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This is #CriticalMargin, where our critic Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows.
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SOMETHING LIKE THIS was bound to happen. After the influx of propaganda films, which has made distinguishing facts from fiction difficult, comes Hello Bachhon, a series that is based on the life and times of an educator and employs every trick in the book to elevate, galvanise and cannonise him while throwing the complications of Indian education and the challenges it poses to students under the bus. On paper, however, making a biopic uncritical towards its subject is not new. But Hello Bachhon takes the mindlessness of the genre to new, more shameless heights as each of the five episodes unfolds as product placement of Alakh Pandey, the educator who started the company Physics Wallah, that provides training for competitive exams like JEE and NEET. It is also no less ironic that the main hook of the show is Panday and his partner Prateek Maheshwari looking for investors to expand and the Pratish Mehta directorial plays out like a pitch deck, assiduously prepared for the next season of Shark Tank. The dishonesty is only scaled with time. During the runtime, Hello Bachhon unfolds as a glorified Wikipedia page of Panday — his humble beginnings, his revolutionary approach of teaching students on YouTube, his refusal to succumb to big corporate's diktat and continuing to provide education to impoverished students for free — as every other problems is reduced to a city-based aesthetic. Take for instance the design of the narrative where “problems”, like poverty, drug-riddled students, female students from patriarchal households, are introduced and magically solved within a 40-minute runtime. All because Pandey is this radical educator who treats his students like people while his other contemporaries (we get a brief glimpse of when the narrative shifts to Kota) use them to fill seats. |
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