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.)
Yay! Preeti likes belly-dancing more than dentistry or sex. We finally get to see her dance at more length and hear her thoughts on dance. Unsurprisingly, she finds it very renewing and her husband is very scornful. I want to congratulate Hum Tum on finding Preeti. She is by far the most compelling character to watch. She is brutally honest without bristling, which is rather impossible to manage.
This episode foregrounds her vocational dilemma. Her boredom during those long hours of dentistry is obvious, and her corresponding excitement at the prospect dance is really heartwarming. For once, I had to agree with Abhay’s commentary on this situation. Abhay seemed suitably outraged that Preeti couldn’t just do what she wanted.
Either Abhay is getting more bearable, or I’m getting Stockholm Syndromed into liking him. He is suddenly less of an interlocutor and more of a cheerleader.
When we first meet Sonal this episode, we saw her distaste for a male gay facebook friend about to consent to an arranged marriage. Also, we saw her distaste for the comments telling him to marry a lesbian woman. I practically cheered when I found out that Sonal is as skeptical as me about gay men who get married to save face, conveniently forgetting to mention they are gay. Also, Sonal pooh-poohs the romantic idea of a gay man in a marriage of convenience with a lesbian.
Mahima didn’t exactly get less adorable this episode, but she did get more depth. Her anxieties about marriage were really touching. However, it wasn’t quite the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? side of marriage we get glimpses of with Preeti. Mahima’s boyfriend was pretty adorable too.
Abhay has this lovely line in which he talks about the robustness of lovers — the Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge archetype. While this episode was ostensibly about Gharwallas, it was clear that the Shaadi mein Phd theme still lingers. And I’ve more than made my peace with that. Not enough can ever be said about long or short term battles with the institution of marriage.