Balls so big, it hurts when they slap your cheeks while you are doing your thing. Don’t get it? Try this -balls pacing at you Yorker style, you almost wet your pants trying to protect the stumps.
Well, we are talking about the balls of a show on Indian cable TV, Maryada. The show set in a small town of Haryana, one of the extreme conservative societies of India, walks us through the lives of an upper middle class family dealing with several social stigmas. The stigmas, as planets in Maryada’s universe that Devyani, the mother of the family had somehow managed to keep in check and to co-exist with the day to day life all through the years is now losing control on them as they race towards attaining escape velocity, the speed they need to break free of the gravity that holds them within.
One of stigmas happens to be related to that of homosexuality. Not just does it bring the subject into every Indian living room for the first time, but it executes it with such relevance to the everyday Indian viewer that it delivers the shock value in an un-shocking way. An illiterate-politician family friend, the male chauvinist father, the innocent village belly wife, the wife’s soon-to-be boyfriend, the omnipresent mother are just a few of the characters we get to see react to the subject in their own way. Sit and watch in awe as Arti, the female friend of Gaurav, who has been providing the perfect cover by pretending to be his girlfriend, finally frees the need to explain his wife, choosing careful words such as that her husband had found his destiny in the form of love towards Karan and he is never to come back even he wants to. Gaurav, in the meanwhile has very few lines and is left with his facial expressions and body language to do the immensely difficult job.
Another subject the show tackles is of the extent of male chauvinism prevalent in the society. If they ever made a chauvinist-detecting gadget, you could never really use it in Haryana, because just as you pass the first galli in Haryana holding it, it would continuously beep with a hypothetical delay of a second here and there, that you are prone to think its broke and go “oh, well” and move on. Brahmanand (the name of the character aptly chosen to resemble to that of the creator of universe, Lord Brahma), often wonders where he went wrong while creating his own world, every time a female member in his family acts against his expectations, like the time when his wife resists his advance in bed and subsequently his widowed sister-in-law doesn’t open her bedroom door for him. I mean, how dare they act this way in the time of his ‘dire’ need? After all, I am a man too and I can understand his plight, LOL.
The drama is so intense that even the filler moments are not left alone; there is no opportunity to take a bathroom-break during the show. Sorry. The writers get ambitious in the sub plots too. We have Uttara, younger sister of Devyani who suffers from a syndrome of never being able to live up to the personality of her elder sister, as if it was not enough traumatic to deal with her sadistic abusive husband. We have, Aditya, younger brother of Gaurav, who has found the love of his life but is yet to find means to provide for himself and his family. Priya, his wife is a different animal all together. She personifies the saying that the female of all species is deadlier; her story is a different dimension and is a topic for some other time, a topic in itself.
The best sub plot by far is that of the ego clash between the Lady politician and Brahmanand, the cop, both trying to grab each other’s balls (something about balls that is omnipresent in this article) at every opportunity they get. Not to mention the abusive but hilarious track of the minister’s treatment of her personal assistant.
Amongst the glamorous colossal mess is the romance between Aditya and Priya, the kind that falls in the league of Yash Chopra, minus SSB – Switzerland, Sridevi and Boobies.
The defining moment of the show was a few weeks ago, while Devyani wishes she could turn the clock back to the time when she was able to perfectly control her universe. Gaurav, her son affirms her that things will get back to normal and it’s none other than herself, who is going to make this happen. One of the best scenes I have seen on any screen, big or small so far. One could have stopped watching the show after this episode as it had already attained its moksha by then - the same way I feel watching every Steven Spielberg’s movie after the defining scene that unfolds during pre-climax.
Today is Sept 3rd and I just got done watching the special weekend maha episode that was simply breathtaking. Damn Gaurav! - played by the devilishly handsome actor Dakssh Ajit Singh.
