Prathyush Parasuraman

It is irritating when religious people use science to explain faith—the language of energy, Einstein, vibrations, frequency etc. to rationalise how blessings and prayers work, for example. (If your prayer is an action, the blessing is the equal and opposite reaction, so the lore goes) Faith operates on a logic that is different from science, and appropriating the language of reason to express the contours of belief, is like demanding the heart to breathe. It is also why the religious film and the science fiction film have been kept apart, because their pursuits, pitch, and parlance seem to walk in different directions. That was until Hanu-Man starring Teja Sajja last year blew those borders apart, to tell a story that, though riddled with the flaws of both genres—too much faith, too much reason—was also packed with the joys of those genres—the joyful imagination, the pungent staging. It built its mythical world on the quirky possibilities of our present, remember the women pickling in the backdrop of a pulping?

The most terrifying stretch of growing up is between the feeling that you are the only one who is going through life—masturbation, bleeding, heaving, wet dreams, shattered hearts—to knowing, no, there are others, too, who are transgressing. “Naan yen ippudi irukkein? (Why am I like this?),” a frustrated, teenaged Ramya (Anjali Sivaraman) asks herself as Bad Girl opens, and you think the film will iron out this misconception—that no, she isn’t alone. But Bad Girl’s preoccupation is elsewhere. The central protagonist of the film, also its central hurdle, Ramya pulls the film from her high-school years, to college, to her early thirties, roughly more than a decade. The film begins frenetically, moving swiftly between her inner and outer world—dialogues delivered in the same decibel—between mid-shots and close-ups, between dreams and reality, life-rooted and life-fabulated. Even the close-ups are wide, rushing the whole world into the image of her face in the trembling foreground.

I suppose the first thing you need to know about Mayasabha is that it is an incomplete show—like most shows these days, hungering for your attention to make you watch their second season, they forget to complete the first. So, before you strap on for this nine-episode saga, know there will be nine more. How has this become common practice among the streamers? Imagine being pushed out of a theatre post interval, and being told that this is all we get to see for now—come later, pay again, for more. They have collectively ruined storytelling as an art form, fracturing it into parts that can be sold cheaply at the marketplace for attention. Mayasabha, also like most shows today, is written with a lethargic hand and an unexcited imagination, beginning with a high-stakes, political, livewire moment, only to recede into a long, winding flashback. We will not return to that high-stakes moment in this season—that is for later.