The Boys Grow Up

Rocket Boys 2 | Cast: Jim Sarbh, Ishwak Singh Director: Abhay Pannu | Hindi | SonyLIV

Jawaharlal Nehru is a shadow of his former ebullient self. Indira Gandhi is slowly coming into her own, becoming an angry young woman. Morarji Desai is always looking for an opportunity to acquire power. And Lal Bahadur Shastri is obsessed with the country’s inadequate grain and milk production. The Rocket Boys are older, more aware of their responsibilities and their nation’s limitations. As Jim Sarbh’s Homi Bhabha says to Ishwak Singh’s Vikram Sarabhai: “Our neighbour wants a piece of our land, our allies want a piece of our profits and our enemies want us dead.” Both men want peace but one wants it through the display of power and the other through pure science-aided development. India is up against the world’s most powerful country, which does not want it to develop a bomb and a conspiracy theory about Bhabha’s plane crash in 1966 long held dear by many is articulated on film here. There are several arguments about how only the dead have seen the end of war and whether an underdeveloped India can afford to build bombs and send rockets into space. These are all accomplishments the current establishment would like to take credit for but it is the courage of those who came before that has placed us here. Rocket Boys makes it clear that the history of independent India began in 1947. The women have been given more agency, with the result that both Mrinalini Sarabhai and Kamla Chowdhry, institution builders in their own right, get more footage, which is entirely due to the generosity of Sarabhai’s children, Kartikeya and Mallika, and grandson Revanta. There is a sense of walking in and out of corridors where historic decisions were made. As in Season One, though, the plot involving Vishwesh Mathur and Mehdi Reza remains the weakest fiction in a series largely based on real events. Since it is also the most controversial, involving the CIA’s alleged plot to subvert India’s nuclear programme, it seems like a cop-out.

Why watch it? A prime example of how entertainment can be more than chewing gum for the eyes

Inside the Life of a Gujarati Family

Happy Family: Conditions Apply| Cast: Ratna Pathak Shah, Raj Babbar Creator: Aatish Kapadia | Hindi | Amazon Prime Video

A grandmother who drinks champagne in a steel glass. A granddaughter who messes up her English metaphors. A grand-daughter-in-law who is happy to stay in a joint family because her son is cared for. A son who is a pharmacist and a stick in the mud. Another son who lives in the US and has just got married in Las Vegas to an unsuitable girl. A domestic help who earns ₹37,000 plus bonus. Happy Family: Conditions Apply chronicles the highs and lows of an extended Gujarati family that lives “saath-saath” in Mumbai’s Bandra. Now the grandson wants to live separately much to his father’s dismay. Aatish Kapadia knows this genre well. Series such as Khichdi (2002) and Sarabhai and Sarabhai (2004) have established him as a master of Gujarati social comedy. His ear for accents, eye for quirks and talent for picking up characteristics from real life find their place in Happy Family with a fine cast led by Ratna Pathak Shah and Raj Babbar as grandparents, as well as Atul Kulkarni and Ayesha Jhulka. There is lots of political incorrectness; from laughing at Black people to scoffing at women with short hair, Kapadia is in fine form. The rest is filled by the fine actors who have honed their craft over years. At one point, Raj Babbar’s grandfather says parents never outgrow their parenthood though children outgrow their childhood. True that.

Why watch it: For Ratna Pathak Shah’s charming Baa

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