Call me Cranky

I’ve been pretty lifeless and out of energy for the past few weeks. It’s led me to spend an inordinate amount of time in bed. So, for the first time in my life: a whole show has been watched on the day it was released.  

I watched Call Me Bae this friday. I was curious; because I fangirl hard on Vir Das and Niharika Lyra Dutta went to the same school as I did. She was a junior and I have some irrational sense of pride when it comes to seeing people, I’ve never spoken to, but knew of back in the day from my school doing well in life.

The show was cringey, fast paced and given that I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish it- quite addictive. Vir Das plays his character so well, that I wanted to throw something at him. Everyone does their part: Ananya plays the ditsy south delhi rich girl, Niharika plays this ambitious go getter and Muskaan is this jugaadu girl. I don’t think I can fault the acting.

Photo by davisuko on Unsplash

I’ve woken up cranky because of the conceptualisation. I’ve been waiting for an Indian show centred around women that hits the nail on the head. That’s memorable and not something I will forget that I saw a month from now. Four More Shots Please, Bombay Begums and many others are in that slew of shows that one watches over a weekend and immediately forgets. This one upset me more because this is our nth attempt at showing independent, liberal and free women and none of them seem to have been given enough of a personality. They are all caricaturised stereotypes. More time has been spent on developing the men on the show than the women.

Bae can only find herself in Bombay because no one in Delhi does any work is a trope I am tired of. Bae shoplifts and Saira gambles because they are lonely and no one in their families pays attention to them is an incomplete narrative. The ‘intellectual’ women dress in cotton saris and speak in jargon that no economist uses in conversation is just lazy. There’s a producer who’s given zero personality until the last episode when she continues to roll the camera. The gym dude cyber stalks Bae to Bombay and all these girls are okay with him entering their space instead of being completely freaked out. He later is the hero who instructs the women to insert a USB into a computer and cracks the connection between the villains of this particular story. Then there’s Neel the extremely hot journalist with integrity who rescues Bae who has been left on a harness by the villain. He tells her that fact checking is a must for a story to qualify as journalistic (something she may have never discovered otherwise). Even though behen-code is cute, for most of the story the men are proving more useful for the plot than the women. The only saving grace in this narrative is that the hot journalist doesn’t know how to swim and Bae teaches him.

It is very entertaining to watch. But it didn’t nudge me to engage with a new idea. Women are unfortunately not the chief protagonists. Why couldn’t a woman have done the rescuing from the harness? Why didn’t one of the women have the computer skills to hack into a computer? As soon as the go-getter Tammarrah found love she melted and no longer felt her career was important? Is that the only scenario in which women decide to take a break or realise they are putting too much pressure on themselves? Can’t one introduce romance without a damsel in distress?

The story of sexual harassment could have had more substance. At least in this fantasy version, men who violate the privacy of women could be jailed !  The CEO of a TV network could express remorse, apologise and promise to put mechanisms in place to do better?

I’m cranky because I believe our country has the talent to create incredible scripts to shoot while having fun withstereotypes. TV has more power than books to capture hearts and minds. So why isn’t Dharma Production willing to push the envelope just a little bit? To trust the audience with nuance and layers. To give women a whole personality? Where is the show we’ll remember and proudly recommend as the one that captured the zeitgeist of metropolitan India in the 2020s? Am I asking for too much ?

PS - If you’ve already identified an Indian show: will you please recommend it to me?

PPS- This post marks half a year (26 weeks) into this endeavour of posting weekly. I’m losing steam, so I may change the frequency of my substack or take a break. You’ll know soon enough.  Thank you to the folks who’ve been reading this since March. It means a lot :) !