Shubhra Gupta

Truth be told, the only reason why I was interested in Kaisi Yeh Paheli is because I wanted to see what Sukant Goel was up to this time, as I had enjoyed his turn in the sadly-truncated Netflix series Kaala Pani. In Kaisi Yeh Paheli, he plays a son who dislikes his mother intensely, sustaining the emotion even when he is tasked with cracking the case of a young woman’s murder.

It was 120 against 3000, and on that fateful November day in 1962, the one hundred and twenty Indian soldiers led by Major Shaitan Singh Bhati kept the much larger Chinese contingent at bay, giving up their lives to save the crucial Chushul valley in Ladakh. It came to be known as the Battle of Rezang La, and in the continuous onslaught of the Chinese army, only six soldiers of the Charlie Company, 13 Kumaon Regiment, almost all of them Ahirs, survived. Farhan Akhtar plays Bhati with brio, leading his men into a ‘jung’ from where there was no coming back, and the result is a war film which brims with the action-and-emotion necessary for a Bollywood drama, but refuses to go under because of it.

The Family Man Season 3 starts from where Season 2 had left off, with top TASC agent Srikant (Manoj Bajpayee) finding himself embroiled in a snowballing crisis in Nagaland. The stakes are higher than ever. Serial bombs have claimed lives. A major casualty can be the high-profile ‘Project Sahakar’, which we are told is on the verge of being signed by ‘all rebel leaders’ in the North East: it is an initiative close to pro-active PM Basu’s (Seema Biswas) heart, meant to address long-standing grievances, and hold out promise of lasting peace and prosperity.

n Stephen King’s novella ‘The Running Man’, which came out in 1982, the dystopia felt unreal. King conjured up a staggeringly unequal world, whose rich live in guarded enclaves, the poor are corralled into slums, and a child could easily die of the common flu if her parents cannot afford the drugs.

If there’s one director who has taken a deep dive into the unlovely world created by toxic masculinity, it is Kanu Behl. His debut feature Titli, which remains his best work, gave us a corner of Delhi most of us had no idea about– a father and three brothers whose family business is car-jacking and violent disposal of bodies, if the need so arises. And if a paternal figure is anything like the one in Titli (played by the director’s own father), it stands to reason that the sons will be like him.

De De Pyaar De, out in 2019, was a startling first for a mainstream Bollywood film, presenting the idea of a much-older man and a young woman as a perfectly viable romantic option. It isn’t as if Hindi cinema hasn’t toyed with the May-December idea before but not to the extent of getting firmly behind the coupling of a distinctly fifty-plus grey-flecked Ashish Mehra (Ajay Devgn) and a spry 26 year old Ayesha (Rakul Preet Singh), who meet cute in London, fall for each other, and start living together.

A third season of a well-regarded series, especially when both the previous seasons have been equally sharp, has two ways to go: up or down. I’m happy to report that Delhi Crime Season 3 is as taut and gripping as the ones that preceded it – well done, Vartika Madam Sir, and co. Season 3 comes three years after the previous one, and this time around DCP Vartika Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah) currently posted in Silchar, Assam and her trusty colleagues, Bhupender Singh (Rajesh Tailang), Neeti Singh (Rasika Dugal), Jairaj Singh (Anuraag Arora), Vimla Bharadwaj (Jaya Bhattacharya) and a couple of others are up against the tough-as-nails human trafficker Badi Didi (Huma Qureshi) whose supply chain extends from Rohtak to Bangkok.

Season 4 of Maharani is largely a mix of the old laced with a bit of new, in terms of actors joining the ensemble. But the tone of the series, created by Subhash Kapoor, and directed this time by Puneet Prakash, is the same: wily netas double-crossing each other mainly in Delhi and Patna with sidebars in other state capitals, family feuds, and personal and professional rivalries. It’s tempting to speculate if the new season has dropped just in time with the on-going elections in Bihar: whatever, it does inject a bit of spice into a show in which tonal similiarity and the length of each episode is becoming a challenge.