The Wisdom of Middlestan

GULLAK, SEASON 4 | Cast: Jameel Khan, Geetanjali Kulkarni | Director: Shreyansh Pandey | Hindi | SonyLIV

Y OUR FATHER SLAPS you. His father slapped him, and so did his father’s father before him. It’s the way society functions,” says the wiser, more responsible Anand Mishra (Vaibhav Raj Gupta) to his younger brother Aman (Harsh Mayar, who is still smarting from being slapped by his father). This is one of the many joys of the fourth season of Gullak, SonyLIV’s web series, the equivalent of a warm blanket on a cold night. The series returns with loving attention to the Mishra family, the embodiment of middle-class India, where aspirations are many and means are limited. Every character is neatly etched. Santosh Mishra, played by Jameel Khan, is the patriarch with his job in the electricity department concealing the romantic in him. He occasionally dances with his wife, cooks mutton for the family and has a couple of pegs of whiskey a day. Shanti (Geetanjali Kulkarni) is the typical homemaker, scrimping, saving, stretching the family budget beyond belief. Anand is the elder brother, happy to shoulder the family’s burden now, while Aman is the dreamer, the storyteller, the poet. There is the nosy neighbour, Sunita Rajwar’s Bittu ki Mummy, whose officiousness hides a deep loneliness; Anand’s bully of a boss who gets his comeuppance, and the local government official, Bulldozer Babu, who is quite receptive to brown envelopes containing cash. This is middle-class Hindustan in one fine sketch.

Why watch it? For its throwaway wisdom of adulting and parenting, the idea of guilt-tripping sons, and the eternal secret of middle-class pride

Between Faith and Falsehood

GAANTH: CHAPTER 1: JAMNAA PAAR | Cast:Manav Vij, Monika Panwar, Saloni Batra | Director: Kanishk Varma | Hindi | JioCinema

IN 2018, THE supposed mass suicide of eleven of a family in Burari, New Delhi, captured the nation’s imagination with its macabre explanations. Was it a mass suicide? Was the family in the grip of a cult? If so, who was the leader? Was there something strange about the family? Gaanth revisits the case, making some changes for copyright reasons. A family of seven seemingly commits suicide leading to a welter of tall theories and wild explanations. There are seven pipes, a missing fiancé, some diaries, and a mysterious sacred fire pit. Investigating it is an unlikely duo of a suspended police officer with an alcohol addiction, a young doctor who sees patterns where others see numbers, as well as a young police woman with a proclivity for conversations in Sanskritised Hindi. The series captures the hothouse atmosphere of East Delhi, the facile hypocrisy of the police and the obsessive sensationalising of the media. In a scene where a senior police officer is trying to frame his junior because it is convenient, the former says: “This is new India, We have left the truth far behind. What matters is optics.”

Why watch it? For Vij’s stolid honesty, Batra’s enigmatic officer, and Panwar’s intensity

About The Author

Kaveree Bamzai

Kaveree Bamzai is an author and a contributing writer with Open

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