Inside the Gilded World of Bae in Mumbai

Call Me Bae | Cast: Ananya Panday, Gurfateh Pirzada, Vihaan Samat | Director: Collin D’Cunha | Hinglish | Prime Video

Ew, she says, looking at the white bread at breakfast. “I thought it had been eradicated from the world like polio.” That is just one of the many silly-smart one-liners in the delightfully frothy and surprisingly feisty Call Me Bae, whose alternative title could have been ‘Bae Goes to Mumbai’, a hat-tip to its spiritual predecessor Emily Goes to Paris. A clever send up of Ananya Panday’s privileged life, with more than a touch of exaggeration, the series delivers a series of truth bombs about the media landscape and the lives of the uber rich. Bae belongs to a rich South Delhi family who only ever wanted her to marry well and for her brother to expand the business. Beginning from the moment she trades her riding helmet for a fascinator, Bae’s future as a desperate housewife is sealed. Or is it? A twist in the tale sees her land in Mumbai without the safety net of her wealth. That’s when she gets a job as an intern in a TV news channel called, what else, TRP and run by an obsessive anchor who believes the nation is a beast that likes to be fed every day, no matter the consequences, played with a touch of menace by Vir Das. It is quite a change for Bae because she comes from a world where news channels work for her. Of course, she has multiple love interests, not in the least her dishy new boss, played dreamily by Gurfateh Pirzada. There are female friends, who believe in the behen code (sister code); some very dark moments; and some deliberately nonsensical scenes where Bae is talking to her luxury bags. There are cameos, the best of which is journalist Faye D’Souza who tells Bae that real journalism is not on TV anymore. Which brings us to Bae’s hard-learned wisdom that the story is bigger than the journalist. And that despite not having eaten carbs for eight years, a vada pav or two never killed anyone. This is one slice of Hindustan in one fine sketch.

 Why watch it? Who doesn’t want to feel like a giddy teenager again, held by the hand in the gilded world of Bae, played with poise and pizzazz by Ananya Panday?

In the Valley of Doom and Gloom

Tanaav 2 | Cast: Manav Vij, Gaurav Arora, Rajat Kapoor | Showrunner: Sudhir Mishra | Hindi | SonyLIV

Badla (revenge) or badlav (change)? That is the question Tanaav raises in its second season as well. The young are angry, stopped, frisked and interrogated at will; the older women are stoic, having borne the loss of husbands, brothers and sons; the security bosses are frustrated; and the forces on the ground are just tired. The Kashmiri accents are a little wobbly but the series, based on the Israeli hit, Fauda, is the closest to the tinderbox the Valley is. It gets the fragile peace of a surveillance state where everyone is looking over their shoulder. The game is old, and it involves the established opposition in Kashmir, the deep state in Pakistan; and the lone wolves, the independent inquilabis who occasionally provide new hope to the estranged young men who don’t want to continue living a life of zillat (humiliation).

Why watch it?

For the questions it raises, the radicalisation it shows, and the fine acting it displays from an ensemble cast, among them a riveting antagonist played by Gaurav Arora; a super spy played with weary intelligence by Rajat Kapoor; and a sympathetic but hotheaded agent, played by Manav Vij

About The Author

Kaveree Bamzai

Kaveree Bamzai is an author and a contributing writer with Open

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