Today's Masterful Manipulation

With the spread of the contagion, came the rise of the art of binge watching. In other words, the stagnancy that lets you sit down and finish an entire TV series, movie series or something in the string of series in one go; lots of episodes you would've taken several weeks to watch otherwise, you finish in a few hours. The term is new, the art is old. Millennials and generation Z are not new to the concept of mindless consumption. With a broken down world handed to us, somewhere along the way, it became easier to stop pondering and start escaping. Art has always been an easy escape. We have just had an abundance of it at our disposal. Unlike the Plague, this time around, being quarantined away made it easy to not come up with concepts even remotely Newtonian. Lots of content came our way. After reaching the end of all good international content available to me, I took a step back and carried the 21st century idea of binge watching to the 80s.

Tanhaiyaan - a story I first watched when I was 8, and a story I have revisited every year since. Each rerun brings out something warm and so comforting.

I don't need to go into the details of the story or the characters. We've all seen the brilliance. What I found most astounding was the fact that we COULD watch this story a thousand times over. There is no reason not to. Which is more than I can say for stories today. Everything today is masterful manipulation of the masses, nothing more. Half way through an episode, you can smell the painful and ever so familiar smell of a misogynist writer's anger at women of the world reclaiming their agency; the producer's audacity is riposted in your face as he reads the script, marvels at the painful death of the female lead when she tries to be anything more than an object, maybe he takes a smoke break and, right after that, he signs off on the project and several more just like it, with the assurance, that it will generate the funds and then some. Finally, to complete the pyramid, you can sense the director read the carefully constructed, disturbingly male-centric script and decide on how best to celebrate and present the most troublesome of male characters and the most subservient of female ones. It's a vicious cycle. It makes me wonder, how did television become an elaborate narration platform echoing the voices of those who are at the centre of the community, not by merit, but by pushing all others to the outskirts? When did it become a mundane repetition of everything that may remind the women of all things hurtful and men of all things dangerous that they must happily accept as mannerism?

Tanhaiyaan wasn't that! It was anything but. Whether it was Annie living a happy, successful, fabulous life as a single woman and taking under her wing two equally headstrong and fearless young nieces. She would strut about fiercely and fabulously, steadfast in the way she lived her life and unfiltered in her talk. One particular scene that comes to mind is when she, without hesitation, barges into Faaraan Sahab's study, with a hilarious disregard for any questions about her audacity that she may encounter and shuts the gentleman up with a profound aap nay mujhe samajh kia rakha hai? Gaajar mooli? Ke dukaan pe gaye, chataank bhar de do! Wo zamaana gaya jub larkion aur bakrion mae koi farq nahi hota tha. Abh bakriyaan seeng maaray na maarain, larkian goli zaroor marengi!

Another underrated character worth mentioning is Faaraan sahab, who was an exemplary ally - I personally don't think that is anything celebratory, so perhaps the perfect bystander, as the women around him ran the show (even in the meta sense)- and what a brilliant show they ran. He would retreat to the comfortable luxury of his study so as to not get in their way and be there for them when needed. It pains me to see that television today has reduced women's worth to what a chauvinistic and disrespectful production company may deem fit to determine. It is distasteful and frankly takes up all my critique. I have none left to offer when it comes to the semantics of cinema or drama. I am too consumed by how traumatic our television screens have become for the women. It makes it all the more easy for me to consume the television of the past. That, or I am perfectly happy watching Midge Maisel in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel get up on stage, stare down at the men and yell, "Am I supposed to find them intimidating?"