Episode 10: The Cost Of Being On Prime Time

By Gaurav Jain

Every weekday in the Connected Hum Tum TV Blog we’ll be posting and talking about the latest goings-on of the six women cantering around Mumbai recording their liveswith video cameras. (Read The Curtain-Raiser post for a quick intro to the show.)

Last night’s episode had a lot more drama than usual, which was a nice change of pace. The idea of independence came to a head with the idea of journeys and their pleasures.

Mahima wrests out of her knot of anxiety about facing her family back home and takes a train to see her sister, who has just been selected onto the Indian Olympian team. She’s a token presence on this episode.

Pallavi takes her new husband, whom she calls Mr Negi, to Goa for his 30^th birthday. Then she seems to spend a lot of the vacation soliloquing on whether she’s snatched him away from his more fun friends and parties. Her moony wonderment seems genuine, and then overplayed and elongated for the camera, and then genuine again. Who knows? Maybe she did feel such pangs, and maybe she also played them up for the show.

Pallavi’s comments on her story’s conflict’ are never interesting. More interesting are the reality TV bits: the footage of her and hubby gamboling on the beach, getting scared by a falling coconut, Mr Nagy stretching lazily in a shack waiting for his meal, and the anomie of walking again on the beach. Does anyone else have this feeling – I wish they’d all talk less and show us more of their lives? These footage snippets that present a summary version often feel too less.

Preeti has never been on a holiday with her husband in five years, and now he proposed a trip to Chandigarh for an old friend’s marriage. Preeti begins making excited preparations. But by the end Sanju backtracks, cancels the family’s plans, and declares that’s it’s more of a work trip and he can’t mix family with it. Preeti is upset and they have several continuing arguments.

She says this has been a pattern, “he ends up going and I’m left behind…So either one holidays alone or one keeps sitting at home.” I thought her using their kid Zohan as the pitch for a family vacation was a weak one. I wonder if she has taken a trip for herself? Put herself into a modern woman’s fairy tale?  She should try it out, it may not be as bad as she dreads. And who knows about the blowsy husband…

Malishka, meanwhile, wants us to only see her frolic gaily in Seychelles. We either see her stage-managed Cute or inside her relationship troubles, which is unfortunate, since maybe she has a life too. We’ll never know. Anyway, she returns to Bombay and, from the taxi home, messages Ravi on his phone to break up with him. More drama next week.

I keep wanting more after each episode – and not in a happy anticipatory way but in an it-was-an-unexpectedly-small-meal way. I wish it was a one hour show or that each half hour would focus on less number of women, but I suppose that’s the cost of being on prime time.