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 lives with video cameras. (Read The Curtain-Raiser post for a quick intro to the show.)
By Nisha Susan
In this episode we saw a fleeting glimpse of Preeti in the her belly dance class and then she’s on her way out. I was all like, wait, wait, I want to see more dancing. But alas, no. What kind of belly dance teacher are you, Preeti? Are you mean? Or friendly? Will we ever know?
The anchor links are framing this show relentlessly, as Gaurav pointed out, in a man versus woman death match. So far, we have seen little of the women’s relationships with the world without this lens. (Except in the case of Mahima and her wild landlady or her auditions.)
Abhay continues to talk about the show in terms of shaadi mein Ph.D, not ladies mein Ph.D,as Poorva pointed out yesterday. Given this narrow frame, I enjoyed most of yesterday’s show and had quite a few moments of pleasure and surprise. Preeti (whose outrageously mobile face I could watch all day long like a kitty cam) had a genuine simpatico moment with her husband when he decided to be thoughtful. And I defy you to enjoy this rare manna dropping into her life any less than she did. “You made my day,” she texts Sanju, and I felt as if I was suddenly privy to a glimpse into all the subterranean world of mismatched but content-seeming couples everywhere. “How does she live with him?” “How does he live with her?” We (by which I mean me) ask this about people we meet all the time. This is apparently how, day by day, with lowered expectations and heightened enjoyment.
Other people’s marriages, I once again reminded my judgemental self, are like icebergs. Who knows what shattering formations lie below the surface?
Pallavi is suddenly, in this episode, a very defamilarised creature to me. Why is she so strange about the newspapers her husband leaves in the loo? Why is she so oblique about being wiped out and not wanting to party with her husband Dalbir after a long day at work? No, nix that. She does explain that she knows Dalbir’s friend are like family to him since he lost his mother as a very young boy. She knows that they spend a lot of time together through the week. So she is reluctant to say no. What is weird comes later. After they leave the party and they are almost home she discovers she has left her phone behind. Dalbir is utterly relaxed about turning the car round to pick the phone up. In the car waiting below the friend’s apartment, Pallavi says to the camera that by leaving her phone behind she has lost a point. Otherwise she had totted up enough points to complain about being out so late. What is this kannakupillai creature she has become? Or did everyone else already get a sense that she is this sort of nervous, passive-aggressive yet deliberate negotiator? I was reluctantly one with Abhay on this one. How about some straight talk, lady?
I enjoyed what was done with Madhavi’s soliloquies in this episode. Madhavi gives her amused-looking daughter truly random pieces of advice about men and marriage. Framing her in an OTT, cartoonish way as if she was a TV guru, with a caption calling her Madhavi TV and Abhay throwing rose petals at the ‘Gyaan Devi’ was the only way to deal with her pieties.
This was, more or less, a cheerful episode livened particularly by a longish sequence of Preeti and Sanju’s adorably doofus child saying, “Papa, huh?” as if he was a baby Hodor.