Issues relating to violence against women keep rearing their head in most unexpected ways. This week Sony’s Rihaee was about irregularities in a women’s prison. The presentation was thoroughly exacerbated, with the actor playing the jailor (Pankaj Berry) taking the cake for punky hamming. We really need to look at issue-based programmes with more compassionate eyes. Star One’s Siddhanth gets the idiom right. This week’s story featured Manini De as a working woman fighting gender bias at work and her husband’s sneering contempt at home. Good story, told with a certain flair. The lead actor playing the wry lawyer is very effective. He just needs to work on his diction in the English language.
Continuing to watch Fame Gurukul sporadically. But losing patience with its ongoing efforts to do ‘reality TV’. What I like are the truly informed judges, particularly Javed Akhtar, who’s a delicious mixture of concern and acidity. Last Wednesday we could see him making a valiant effort to be ruthless with a contestant. “How do you expect to emerge a winner when you say you are the fifth best among your colleagues?” Javed Akhtar made a male contestant squirm. But Qazi (that was the contestant’s name) handled the aggression well.
Why was British actor Toby Smith telling the correspondent on CNBC that working in movies in Britain is so much easier? And that he has decided not to play James Bond because “once you’re Bond, you’re Bond”. Technically not true. Sean Connery was Bond. But he also did others, and well.
There was a wonderful documentary last Saturday on DD News about a girl born of cross-parentage and how she coped with the ‘Muslimness’ in her personality as opposed to her Hindu side. What was remarkable about this sensitive documentary was that it was chatty and intimate rather than polemical and distancing. As she took us to the places and feelings that she experiences everyday the film made us feel close to the protagonist and her predicament. We don’t get that feeling too often on TV unless it’s Ravi Rai’s Kasshish on Zee where we feel totally clued in to the wife Simone Singh’s miscarriage. Otherwise sensitivity isn’t a big virtue on Indian TV.
