Mahakumbh 77-80: Distorting mirrors

Posted: 8 years ago

Folks,

For those wondering about the title, it is   because , like the rooms full of such mirrors in amusement parks, where everyone passing in front of them looks anything but what he/she is,  our tale too is increasingly  full of people who are nothing like what they appear to be.

Leela is not the  abla shoshit naagin that Rudra takes her to be.  The Shivanand now onscreen is not quite the  tortured erstwhile brains trust  that the other garuds take him to be,  but something quite different and possibly sinister.  MB now seems very  different from the firm but benevolent guru she was, and indeed looks  very suspicious to Rudra's team, for though we  know  the truth, the other   garuds don't .

And now Professor APG  Rao is not the wise guru  he has seemed to be all along,  dedicated to the protection of the amrit, but that character beloved of crime novelists: the Master Criminal.  In short a 21st century James Moriarty (the arch-nemesis of Sherlock Holmes),  secretly controlling a far flung empire of crime,  like  a spider lurking at  the centre of its web, complete with an ultra respectable public persona as an esteemed professor. So esteemed that the Banaras Hindu University invites him to address their students. Incidentally, Moriarty too was a university professor, but  of higher mathematics.

If  it  were not for his garud lineage, I am sure Tiwari too would turn out  to be a Colonel Sebastian Moran, the right hand man of the Master Criminal  Moriarty/Rao. Or perhaps a Raa... bert to Ajit the Loin/Rao?😉

Mea culpa!: As soon as I saw the Thursday night  precap, I rushed off to do two things.

One, I ordered an XXXL size laurel wreath, to be shared by all those who had propounded, and stuck to the Rao the Rogue theory against all odds. 👏

This includes Sandhya,  who plumped for Rao because she saw him a la Ajit  the Loin,  seated at  a huge desk,  framed in coloured lights and with  shoes sizes 8 & 9,  presiding over his evil empire with  a Mona darling by his side!  🤣

NB: I see  that already mischievous speculation is rife in my last thread as to who among the present female population of Mahakumbh could be slotted in as Mona darling. With no results thus far, which is not surprising, seeing  that the choice would   have to be between  MB, Thappadiya Mai  (the  very thought is enough to make the mind boggle!😉) , and the still recumbent Maya, given that Katharine lacks the pizzaaz needed for a Mona darling, and Leela, a  far more suitable sultry siren, seem to be the prime candidate  for the naag bali!

Two, I ordered a sack cloth and ashes outfit  for myself, for having tried to explain away the suspicious points re: the aforesaid capo di capos (a Mafia term meaning boss of bosses) Rao, on the basis of careful  logic. Now logic and the writers of TV serials are natural enemies, and I should have known better than to oppose the "least likely one is guilty" thesis! 😉

Jazzy (Veritaserum) gets a dab of the ashes for her touching but somewhat misplaced faith in my ability to predict future developments  in this tale!

A plot twist full of holes: Having thus gracefully conceded defeat, I  shall now proceed to point out that this sudden plot twist is almost as full of holes as Swiss cheese.  Let me flag some of them for your amusement. And no, it is not sour grapes at all!!

Rao is based in India, and has a solid and genuine academic reputation and position. Granted that he could have fooled Shivanand and Tiwari,  both his students,  for so long, but  to accept that he  ran that Secret Society too,  with the patrician  Cardinal (I refuse to have him summarily demoted to Bishop by Greyerson)  as a figurehead, from here demands a considerably greater suspension of disbelief.  It is not at all easy for someone who is so high profile that he  knows the Home Minister of India,   and the Army top  brass (who let him have that gizmo for checking out the  Saraswati Kund), to lead such a dangerous double life, involving innumerable foreign connections and God knows how many henchmen like Greyerson,  for decades without being caught  out.

But the real hole in this dramatic twist - and it is a hole big enough to drive a truck thru it! - is that Rao, as the  Cardinal's boss, had Shivanand kidnapped, held prisoner and tortured for  24 years to get at the knowledge that he had acquired from the Second Book, as also from  his researches into the amrit  reappearing at the once in 144 years Mahakumbh .

But why was this necessary at all? Shivanand always had total samarpan  towards Prof.Rao, whom he considered his guru, and he would surely have  shared all that he knew with him, willingly and even eagerly, in the belief that they were working together to achieve the same goal. That was amply evident from their interactions, right up to the fiasco of the Saraswati Kund experiments with Prof.Rao's gizmo.   

The whole thing  makes no sense at all, and this is the single biggest, indeed fatal lacuna in this script shocker.

Then again, his mystery visit to Delhi was obviously not to Delhi at all, but to Poland to force the Cardinal to commit suicide  (and thus, after committing this mortal sin,  go straight to where he would have gone anyway, hell) and take over the whole operation himself. But why was that necessary? One would have thought that it would have been far easier for Rao to have stayed on board the garud bandwagon till the very last moment, and then arranged to grab the amrit  thru some sort of sleight of hand.

Curious acts of omission: Next, he has been  operating, thru the Cardinal and Greyerson, with the Veshes and the nagas, ie with Dansh.  He thus has both ends covered - the garud end and the naga end - which is what he says  in the precap to his subordinates at what looks like their first board meeting. For this to work, both groups have to have the ability to get to the amrit. The nagas  have come quite some distance in this respect, but not the garuds,  who, right now, seem remarkable only for their utter disorganization and the  lack of any viable action plans from their side.

Activation of  the garuds' powers: For this  garud  group to have any chance of success, all their powers need to  be activated.  Why then does Rao not press,  as soon as Rudra arrves with the Two Books and Rao  finds that he cannot make any sense of them,  for this activation to be done at once by MB? It would have sounded very logical and no  one, not even MB, could have objected.

But he does nothing of the kind. So  now, thanks to MB's canny move to undercut him by making off with the Two Books and inveigling Dansh into working with her, at least for the present,  Rao  is left with a bunch of powerless garuds and no Books, plus a non-functional Shivanand. Which means that unless he can somehow manage to activate the powers of the other garuds,  Rao's  dependence on the nagas  to get the amrit  will  be now almost total.

Perhaps this is the reason for the  suggestion that one naga be sacrificed to  get one garud's powers activated - though it is not as yet clear  who has told Rudra this. Which of course  leads to Tiwari pointing to Leela as the candidate of choice. Rudra will of course refuse, leading to deeper daraars  among the  garuds,  who are already at odds with him over his decision to give refuge to Leela.

The Saraswati Kund explorations: Then there is Rao's  bizarre failure to resume the explorations in the Saraswati Kund, which had had to be abandoned after Daadi cut up rough. Daadi is no more, thanks to Dansh, and even if Shivanand too is not available, surely Rudra could have stood in for him? All that was needed was to set up the gizmo and collect the samples. Rao & Shivanand were on the point of  being able, thru those samples,  to ascertain where precisely the vilupt  Saraswati would re-emerge at the Triveni Sangam, bringing the amrit kalash  in its wake. Why then did Rao not pursue these vital investigations, instead of sitting with a blank face in front of the Two Books?

Sector 53: The last and most ludicrous is his fiat  to the Veshes,  that Sector 53 should be completely cleared of all the  kalpavasis  and all the tents etc. now there, with  this eviction to be accomplished thru death threats if need be.

But again, why?  Rao had already had Sector 53 allotted to him officially by the DM, along with Sectors 17 and 34 (?), ostensibly  for his Project Ganga work, but which he actually intends to use for the Mission Amrit. Shivanand and Tiwari both know of this,  and both are  eager to work on this with their guru. Why then does Rao now want the whole area cleared?

And if he does want it, why does he not  get it done officially, citing some reason like an outbreak of a serious infection, thru DM Tiwari? It would be  far, far easier for him than for the Veshes, who have no official standing.

Trying  to evict everyone from that Sector would attract an enormous amount of adverse media attention these days - it is not  1869, after all -  and as soon as one lot are evicted, another lot will stream in and occupy the places vacated in this special area.

Most important  of all, how on earth can the Veshes get away with mass killings of the kind Rao apparently contemplates? One Maimuyi being murdered in broad daylight with impunity   is one  thing, and about  20 people being shot at one night by unknown criminals is another ( though in truth, during the 55 days of Mahakumbh 2013, with over 70 million pilgrims, no crime more serious than theft actually occurred) , but this kind of mass killings  would be quite something else ! It would leave Sector 53 teeming with so many policemen that no one else would be able to even get near the Ganga.

Highly implausible: All in all, folks, this latest twist - of Rao doing a Moriarty - seems  ill thought out and flippant,  something tossed at us for shock value, but hardly credible. Not that we can do anything about it, but  my opinion of the Mahakumbh scripting is going downhill. The narabali ,  or rather naagbali  angle is ugly and unnecessary, and that too has been tossed in with a kind insouciance that is as startling as it is unpleasing. 😡

Now for the rest.  I plan to concentrate on just 2 major elements: one,  MB's plan to inveigle the nagas  into  cooperating with the garuds  for getting the amrit,  on a share and share alike basis, and the other, an assessment of where our Garud Pramukh is at present, as regards both his dil and his dimaag. The remaining elements mostly  fit into one of the other of these two.

The Great Negotiation:  Well, I could hardly have started anywhere else, could I? It was manna from Heaven, that long scene between  the saatvin garud  and the Naag Pramukh, one worthy of the Mahakumbh record books. Without competing in any way with the emotionalism and the lambent wisdom that made the MB-Rudra scene in Episode 72 so luminous, this one, purely cerebral, was fantastic in an entirely different way.  But never fear, I am not going to devote 3 pages+  to this one! Thoda to kam  hi hoga!! Like, say, 2 1/2 ? 😉

The first rampart: It was, and this is what appealed to me the most as a professional diplomat, a classic exercise in negotiating successfully with a viscerally hostile and very intelligent opponent.

So first, MB has to impress Dansh with her extraordinary, supernormal  powers,  to prove to him that she is an interlocutor worthy of his attention. Whence the intimidation of the gun-toting guards, beginning with,  not a request, but an announcement: Main andar jaakar Naag Pramukh se miloongi,  followed by the almost casual threat to burn down the naaglok if need be to make her way in.Then  the slamming down of her dand, making the earth crack and forcing the guards to retreat. And so on to Dansh.

He circles her, hand to his forehead as if to keep his eyes from being dazzled- a quirky gesture that, followed by the wicked remark that to his jawaan aankhein,  all old women (poor, still very pretty Ganga, to be so slotted with Daadi and MB!😉)  look exactly the same, is vintage Dansh, half calculated, half nutty.

When she passes his bullet test with flying colours - the shot of  a bullet being moulded to  fit the contours of her unwavering eye  was superb - he is quick to voice his admiration: Guruji se aapke baare mein jo suna tha, kam tha. But he is no pushover, even for a woman who can halt a bullet  in its tracks, and so he tries to gain the upper hand by refusing the daya ki bheek  that he  assumes (or pretends to assume) that she is here to seek.  His look at that moment is very interesting, the right hand, still holding the  gun, to his cheek, and the eyes as bright and  curious as a bird's.

But MB is not about to be tripped up so easily, so she counters him with just 5 words: Sauda to ho payega na?

She  follows this up with a smooth putdown, that the nagas  do not have the blessing of being able to show daya,  something that has been granted to the garuds.  She proceeds to brandish her bait: Main bas tumhare ek sauda karne aayi hoon, jo hum donon ke fayde ka hai..

And the fish bites. In a delightful little segment, both Dansh, who bows from the waist in courtly invitation, and MB, who  counters with a Lucknawi aap pehle,  make their way up the stairs to the naga sanctum sanctorum.  She has breached the first rampart.

The opening round: Once inside, MB deploys another time-honoured negotiating  tactic, that of putting the interlocutor-antagonist off guard right at the beginning. So, even before Dansh has seated himself, she pops an entirely unexpected question: Surang kahan se khod rahe ho?  It was priceless, the frozen, startled look on Dansh's face, as he straightens himself and looks across at this little old lady who does not come even up to his shoulder.

Meanwhile, she has seated herself, a satisfied, smug smile on her face, and she answers his unspoken question: Itna hairaan kyon ho rahe ho? Hum garud hamesha khule aakaash mein udte hain.. tum naag paatal se chup kar vaar karte ho... The important thing to note here is that this is said with a total absence of anger or  even rancour, simply as a statement of fact.  For anger, however justified,  has no place in a negotiation of this kind.

Dansh is by now intrigued, and his dark blue eyes look puzzled as he asks: Hamari neeyat tak pehchaanti hain aap, phir bhi humse sauda karne aayi hain? Note that he is not sneering at her, as he would have done at any of the other garuds.   He senses, for he is no fool, that this woman is someone quite out of the ordinary, and he wants to find out where she is coming from and what she really wants.

MB begins on a philosophical note, about  the indispensability of both amrit and vish  for maintaining  the jeevan ka santulan. Ek ke bina doosra naakaam hai. Isiliye, hum chahein na chahein, humein saath milkar chalna hoga.

Dansh has  surely never heard this line before, but he is  not going to show that he has been taken aback, all the more so as there is now, inside him,  the  first stirring of real interest in her sauda. So he throws his head back and hisses in his typical style, then smiles  half sardonically as he pops his question: Deal kya hai?

But MB is too canny to get to that straightaway: Dansh needs to be softened up a bit first. So she strikes just the right chord with him,  by bringing up, with empathy and understanding, the sorest point for  him and the other nagas, the injustice that was done to them. She seems shocked as she mentions how,  after the samudramanthan  when, even after swallowing so much of the halahala vish (and here she  seems to go with Dansh's version of this part, that it was only the  nagas  and the bichchus - not the garuds -   that had helped Lord Shiva get rid of the poison by ingesting it), tumhare hisse aadha amrit bhi nahin aaya?

 Dansh's face hardens as the bitter memories of the past millennia crowd into his mind. And he quirks his eyebrows in a delightfully skeptical gesture as MB  follows this up with an emphatic: Par is baar wo aayega.  Jo samudramanthan ke baad devataon aur asuron ke beech nahin hua tha, wo ab hoga. Is Mahakumbh mein, garudon aur naagon ke beech amrit ka bantwaara hoga!

Dansh waves his hand in calculated incredulity: Aur yeh hoga kaise??

The second round:  He is secretly impressed with this little old woman, and as she delves into her jhola,  his eyes are fixed on her, with the  half incredulous, half hopeful look of a child at a magic show.

However,  as she extracts the Two Books, places  them on the table between them, and pushes them to the middle,  the light in Dansh's eyes fades, and he rises and turns his back on her. He seeks to hide his acute disappointment , Abhi to main tumhein thoda seriously lene laga tha.. Par dikha diya na? .. in a sardonic boast, Dansh jahan tak soch sakta hai, wahan tak tum saaton garud milkar bhi nahin soch sakte!  

But trust MB to retain the upper hand! Her flat Main kitabein dene nahin aayi hoon,  followed up by the candid declaration Inke rahasya to tum kab ke khol chuke hoge, brings Dansh back; he turns around and  faces her, and then begins to pace up and down near her like a panther in a cage. He is waiting to see  what she comes up with next. And this time, she does not disappoint him.

He has his back to her, and he is holding himself ramrod straight, but he is all ears as she goes on, the very casualness of her tone belying the explosive content of her words. Par Guruji ne yeh bhi bataaya hoga ki ek teesri kitaab bhi hai, jiske bina amrit tak pahunchna asambhav hai?  The last word is pronounced like a coda, like a question left hanging in the air.  It is the bait to reel in the fish once more, and Dansh, though he  does not move, is now unsure and eager to get at the truth of this new revelation.

To make sure that he does not get away, MB now raises the ante. Aisa kaun hai jo us kitaab ka pata jaanta ho? Use paane ka raasta bata sakta ho? The bait is now out in the open,  for she clearly means herself as the answer to these rhetorical queries. But the fish is still unsure,   wavering: Karoon ki nahin karoon?, and MB can read this in Dansh's back.

So she plays one last card. Rising from her seat, she goes up to Dansh and warns  him in a confidential tone. Baki jo ab Rudra karne ki soch raha hai, wo tum saaton naag milkar bhi soch nahin sakte (not that we have ever seen any of the other 6 nagas,  unka kuch sochna to door ki baat hai!). Par main jaanti hoon, isiliye bata rahi hoon. Jitni jaldi faisla karoge, utna hi tumhare liye achcha hoga.

 She winds up this colossal piece of bluff (for we know that Rudra, far from thinking up a plan that would be far beyond the mental capacities of the  sapta nagas, ie of Dansh, is in a total mess, with  no early solution in sight) with the perfect  move. She returns to her seat, crosses her hands in her lap with no evidence of any extra eagerness or any tension, and awaits his  response  in a totally placid manner.

The precap shows that Dansh has risen to her bait, for he has called  in Guru Drish, and is arguing vociferously with him, storming up and down the room, while an unruffled MB looks on.

Bluff or no bluff ? :Now we have no idea if MB has just run a gigantic bluff about the Third Book, or there is indeed such a guide to the amrit  that only she knows about. Either is possible.

It is  also clear that she has embarked on this dangerous and uncertain path because she sees no other option and time is running out. She has no hope of  curing Shivanand any time soon, given Rudra's opposition to her rough techniques. Thus, there is no chance of moving ahead depending on Shivanand.  Plus, she might have some inkling of what Rao is really up to, and so she has removed the Two Books from his reach, and Rudra's,  for the present.

She is playing a lone hand because she has been forced to do so, but no one can do that better than she can!

But the thing for now is that she has managed to sow the seeds of discord between the Naga Pramukh and his Guru - for they are, to judge from Dansh's body language in the precap, clearly at odds with each other, and my guess would be that Dansh would want to accept MB's sauda .

She has also opened up the possibility of the garuds,  who have the keys to the sapta dwaar guarding the amrit  in the end phase, and the nagas,  who now know how to get to the precise spot where the amrit kalash  will surface, at the apex of the whirlpool that will arise in the re-emergent Saraswati, to actually work together to fit the two parts of this cosmic puzzle together, and get to their goal as a team.

Now this may seem like, and might actually be a pipe-dream, given Dansh's proclivity for deviousness. But surely MB knows all this, and any plan she might make for a joint operation would have factored this is. We, the viewers, can only await developments.

Excellent jodi: For now, however, this was a sequence to remember, as MB and Dansh played off each other to perfection. To say that Seema Biswas was superb is merely to state the obvious. The surprise package on Thursday night, however,  was Dansh,  who was far better enacted  than ever before.

There has been some earlier  hints of what he could do, apart from his standard, sneering, OTT arrogance and bluster. For example,  in his scene with Leela when he twists her wrist,  and she almost screams, in acute pain, Kya kar rahe ho?  Dansh opens his eyes wide in mock innocence, nods his head in mock surprise, and  replies Tayyar kar raha hoon!  It was a  very brief  shot, but it was delightfully light-hearted. 

Again, earlier, when Leela protests stormily at being told by Dansh that she cannot accompany her father to the Mahakumbh, and Drish backs this decision, the look of sardonic amusement in Dansh's  eyes was reminiscent of Rhett Butler looking at Scarlett O'Hara after one of their spats  in Gone with the Wind.

In this longish  segment with MB, Rahil  built on all this and carried it much further. After his  deliberately exaggerated  gestures and remarks in the opening sequence before he leads her in, in the  actual session in the inside chamber, his Dansh was pitch perfect, matching MB step for  step. One rarely gets to see such an excellent pas de deux between two such unlikely partners, which, along with the chiselled  lines and the  flawless direction, left me at least exclaiming Yeh dil maange more!  

Rudra: struggling to stay afloat: After watching all the 4 episodes at one go once again, my heart went out to poor, bewildered Rudra, harassed and beset as never  before, and yet determined not to give way to  weakness, but to soldier on in the conviction that in the end, victory would be theirs. This is the stuff of which a leader is made, no matter how incapable and inadequate his followers are.

It was admirable, the gentle, anxious persistence with which he tries to get Shivanand back to some semblance of normalcy, so that he can play his allotted part and, by awakening the powers of the other garuds,  take them that crucial distance towards their goal. Gautam was excellent here, the sharp watchfulness in his eyes,  as he gauges his father's reactions, alternating  with the melting tenderness with which he coaxes and cajoles him. As Rudra says in an earlier episode this week, looking at the photo of the two of them when Rudra was 4, Koyi bhi naya rishta hamare rishte ko chota nahin  kar sakta, Baba.

 I devoutly hope Rudra's efforts with his Baba  pay off,  and that he  can then breathe easy for a bit.

Earlier, after he comes back from locating the missing MB thru the Garuda Position Detector  in the library , Rudra makes one capital mistake. When he first spots MB in the astral display in the library, he exclaims to himself Maimuyi naagon ke pas hai! which is accurate, for though it is dismaying enough, it contains no hint of her having joined the nagas. But when, back in the Brahma Nishta Panth, he is confronted by Thappadiya Mai,  he blurts out something that is not only factually incorrect but  which unthinkingly condemns MB as a  traitor to the garud cause. He says: Maimuyi naagon  ke saath hai.

No wonder that he is , immediately,   deafened by the loud, clueless and, in Rao's case, motivated maligning of  his Maimuyi as  a traitor who had gone over to the nagas  and, what was worse, had taken their talisman, the Two Books, with her, so that the other garuds could not have their special powers activated, something that , they insist, she had deliberately avoided doing while she had been with them.

From then on, his follow up statements: Unhon ne kaha tha ki kitabein yahan surakshit nahin hain..Pata nahin kyon, par Baba ke saamne kitaabon ke baare mein baat hi nahin karne deti thin..Shaayad isiliye un donon kitaabon ko lekar chali gayi hon.. fall, predictably, on deaf ears. He tries countering the accusation that she had deliberately not activated the powers of the other garuds by pointing to his own case, but that too is promptly  negated by Katharine.  It is not so easy to defend even the truth in front of shrill, sustained calumny, especially when the object of such calumny has left Rudra with very little ammunition with which to defend her.

So, I was very proud of Rudra when he persisted in his innate belief in his Maimuyi's integrity: Mujh par to bharosa hai na aap sab ko? Dekhiye, mujhe to lag raha hai ki jo dikh raha hai waise hai nahin.. Bhale hi Maimuyi kitabein le gayi hon, bhale hi wo naagon ke  saath  hon (again that dratted saath!), par humein lagta hai ki yeh dhoka nahin, unki koyi neeti hai..

I was almost clapping at this point - for was  it not Rudra's dil, but his dimaag which had reached this very wise conclusion.And Gautam brought this out perfectly.

But as if on cue, Shivanand, till then fast asleep, suddenly started howling Mujhe mat maro, mujhe mat maro!!  (a suspicious bit of timing, but of that more later), and the tentative half-belief that Rudra's assertion was beginning to produce was shattered in an instant. Predictably, Rao pitches in with his insidious poison,  calling on Rudra to manao his heart that was unwilling to accept the truth about Maimuyi.

Nonetheless, Rudra will not cede ground re: his Maimuyi,  nor  has his faith in her vanished despite all these concerted  efforts to destroy it. For as he is speaking to himself, he says: Yeh hamari ladayi ki nayi neeti (?) hai ya dhokha, nahin jaante Maimuyi, par is baar hum  kamzor nahin padenge. And I was exclaiming Atta boy, Rudra!

Rudra and his guru:  Need for faith:  This was a great improvement on his predictable, knee-jerk  reaction to MB's admittedly shocking method for detoxifying Shivanand and getting him back on his feet.  

I had set out  my views on Rudra's in my mini-post (yes, really mini!) on that episode 78 ,

Mahakumbh 78: A contrary view

https://www.indiaforums.com/forum/post/122177379

I do not propose to repeat any of that here, but the crux of my  argument was this.

Given that  MB is wise and all knowing - something that she has proved repeatedly in the recent past   - and that but for her presence and her powers, the garuds would be nowhere, should not Rudra have had more faith in her?  If she is thrashing his Baba with what looks like unacceptable harshness, should he not have tried to find out why she is doing this? 

I too found it bizarre that one can leach poison out of a person by beating him, and  the brutality of it was not something a son could  be expected to swallow even from his guru.   But   it  is not a question of  good and bad. It is a question of unavoidable  harshness. Rudra should know that  MB would never be  needlessly  cruel, that  she is not the kind to enjoy inflicting pain. So if she, who is totally dedicated to the  Mission Amrit, does this kind of thing, it is because it is necessary. She is not thrashing Shivanand, but the naagon ki taraf se hamare liye bheji huyo dar ki bimaari lurking inside him, and this only because there is no other way, and she says so. Avoiding this beating is a luxury she cannot afford.

Rudra, who owes his punarjanma to MB,  should have thought of all this,  and  he should have never assumed so easily that his Maimuyi is doing wrong. On the contrary, he should have taken it for granted  that there had to be a valid reason for what she was doing and he should have asked her what it was. But he does nothing of the  kind, and  literally drives her away with a Garud Pramukh ka aadesh.

MB's failing: Subsequently, he has, as noted above, corrected course to some extent. And I for one would not blame him for a lingering vestige of  a doubt. For if MB had spoken  aloud to Rudra and the other garuds  what she says to herself after issung a ban on their meeting Shivanand till he is cured: Shivanand naagon se apne andar vish lekar aaya hai.. Agar wo jald se jald theek nahin hua, to naagon ka yeh vish garudon mein bhi phail jayega.. there would not have been so much, or indeed any suspicion of her intent. 

Her point about Shivanand's  dangerous infection spreading was spot on. It was in fact confirmed when Dansh tells Leela,  in casual triumph, about Shivanand's total collapse, and adds: Aur yeh aaise phailnewali bimari hai ki hum tak pahunchne se pehle, aapas mein hi  ladkar khatam ho jayenge satoon ke saat garud.

Doubts about Shivanand: I would also call to your attention the para in that mini-post Sinister hint about Shivanand. The line I have taken there  is that Dansh's poison  is slowly eviscerating  the garud in Shivanand and replacing with a sinister substitute, a naga mole. I have not seen the latest promo, but I am told it hints at something like this.

This theory would fit in both with MB's warning to Rudra not to discuss the Two Books in front of Shivanand, and with the fleeting instants when Shivanand, in the midst of his frenzied screaming and wailing at the Saraswati Kund, suddenly looks lucid, sharp and sly, especially when he sees MB  and Rudra falling out over  him. The way in which he suddenly awakens from his stupor and starts yelling Mujhe mat maro! , just when Rudra is trying to defend MB's visiting the nagas,  is also distinctly odd.

Even otherwise, Shivanand's weeping and moaning and yelling seem greatly overdone. He has after all  sustained far worse beatings, for full 24 years  while he was in prison in Poland, without even crying out, such was his inner strength. And even after ingesting all the poison that Dansh has pumped into him, Shiva was hallucinating and thus aggressive in the defence of Rudra, both when he was driving the shav vahan and later near the Saraswati Kund.  He was not whimpering and moaning and screaming like he does now. It is hard to believe that so tough a man could be so thoroughly shattered, mentally and physically, just because of a series  hard blows with MB's staff.

Moreover, how else is one to make sense of what Dansh tells Drish about the role he has planned for Leela: Leela hi hamari sab se badi strategy hai, Guruji. Garudon ka dimaag to hum trace kar lenge, lekin unke dil mein kya chal raha hai, yeh sirf Leela trace kar sakti hai..

How can Dansh find out what is going on in the minds of the garuds  unless he has a mole in place who can transmit all the details of their confidential conversations to him (whereas they would never discuss anything secret in front of Leela), unless he has somehow converted Shivanand into a receptor-cun-transmitter?

If this is true, the blowback  for Rudra and the rest of the  garudsl will be terrible,  for they   will face an enemy in their  own camp, their fellow garud  and former brains trust, Shivanand. It might then be almost too late. But only almost , as this is a fairy story, not real life!

The other mole: The gentle thumping sound you hear is me patting myself on the back for having, for once, guessed correctly that  Dansh would  smuggle her into the garud  camp, after slapping her hard  enough to draw blood and make it convincing for her to pose as a shoshit abla naari,  no, shoshit abla naagin. He actually used the word abla!😉  The scene between Dansh and Leela that preceded this move was good fun, and a nice change from the disorganised garuds   and from the usual Dansh as well. This was of course before his scene with MB!

The pyaadas who would be vazirs: The Veshes look and behave more and more like jackals kowtowing to a lion, or now to two contending lions,  than like independent villains.  The delighted greed that lit up their eyes of the 50  crores (drug money, one presumes, for no other criminal endeavor yields such huge profits for such small volumes transacted) must have been almost extinguished when they learn that it was intended for bribing the kalpavaasis  in Sector 53 to vacate  the whole area at the very earliest. 

This is a ludicrous, and totally unnecessary demand - as I have discussed at the beginning - but that does not make life any easier for the Veshes, now  caught in a cleft stick between the conflicting demands of the  Mahaguru of their race, Drish, and of this terrible new boss of Greyerson's. I guess that for two pins, they  would be ready to throw in the towel and simply bolt!😉

NB: The path to the underground library seems to have fast become a thoroughfare, with all the garuds  and Rao strolling  in and out as they please.  How come the Veshes' or Dansh's spies have not yet discovered it?

Secondly, the way in which Tiwari, Katharine and Charles react when they see MB taking the books is odd, seeing that they are addressing Rudra's guru. It is  in fact  downright disrespectful. Would they behave the same way if  Rao had been taking the Two Books? No. That, and  the way Katharine argues with  MB,  fully warrant the thrashing they all get. Which, in any case, reminded me of nothing so much as similar scenes in the 1960s mythologicals, which invariably had the kids in whoops!😉

I cannot wait to see their collective faces when Rao's true character is revealed.😉

I only wish MB had let Tiwari fire his gun at her, and had then done what she did  with Dansh later. Now that would have  been some show! The fact is that even after Rudra has had all his chakras   opened,  his special powers, so far as we have seen, are nowhere near MB's.  What we need, at the earliest, is MB's full backstory.

Shyamala B.Cowsik


 


 

 

 

 

Edited by sashashyam - 8 years ago
Posted: 8 years ago
Too good a character is shown and it takes a U-Turn all of a sudden - A somewhat old technique but can be a good game changer if executed well. 
Good to see some U-turns being brought about.

Even JK Rowling chose to throw some mud on Prof.Dumbledore in the last book. No one needs to stay very pure in a drama. 😆

As adi keeps saying that RUDRA will do a la raknikant in the final episodes and do whatever is needful, it looks like !!! More power to him. 
Posted: 8 years ago
My dear Sri,

It is not just a U turn. As you would have seen from the  post, it is pure and simple nonsense, just cooked up for shock value. Much like Ajathashatru turning out to be the nemesis of Yudh in Yudh,  when it was clear that he could not have done 80% of the things he was credited  with by the end.

Shyamala Akka

Originally posted by jayaks02


Too good a character is shown and it takes a U-Turn all of a sudden - A somewhat old technique but can be a good game changer if executed well. 
Good to see some U-turns being brought about.

Even JK Rowling chose to throw some mud on Prof.Dumbledore in the last book. No one needs to stay very pure in a drama. 😆

As adi keeps saying that RUDRA will do a la raknikant in the final episodes and do whatever is needful, it looks like !!! More power to him. 
Posted: 8 years ago
Hi Shyamala,
Thanks for the PM. This is an amazing analysis. Yes Rao is Moriarty. I always knew there was something seriously dodgy about this guy. From the time he took Charles home and said he was his long lost grandfather, I was highly suspicious of his true intentions. Then I thought, is he just like Shiva, who is obsessed with the mission of "Save Amrit?" But I was still dubious, and felt his interest WAS in Amrit, but not in saving it, but in claiming it! :) I was proven right!


He turned out to be the Boss of the Bishop and Greyerson's unseen boss! Pretty sinister stuff. Even when they showed that "shadowy" figure with the glasses on? I was thinking..."Is this Rao?" I was right! It is! Now the interesting part is to see how he plays this game. Playing Garud's against the Naga's. He wants to get Amrit from one of them, coz he knows one of them WILL get it. So have allegiances with both sides. Directly with the Garud's by acting as one of their "wise counselors" and indirectly with the Nagas through Greyerson and the Sri-Santh resident Satan's, Devesh and Balivesh. (On an aside, I just love the sarcastic exchanges between, Devesh, Balivesh and Greyerson!). It's too much! Some of the most entertaining parts of the story are brought by these three and their "Chaal-Kapat" discussions! :)


Now of course Leela comes to the Garud's. Bhairavi is with Dansh, playing mind games. Shiva is fully mind controlled by "Vish!". What will happen next? I am honestly waiting with bated breath! This show officially up'd the anti last week and kicked into the next gear! I am now excited for it, the same way when I first saw teenage Rudra and his coming of age. That part of the story with Siddarth Nigam was superb! Even Sima B was amazing as Mai Mui. Now she is Bhairavi, not Mai Mui. She is a different kettle of fish. But her powers are fully functioning. I think she is functioning even above our "Garud Pramuk" coz she is playing major strategy with the big boys now!

Long post, but then I had a lot to say, coz the show just got amazing! :) 


Posted: 8 years ago
Solid post as usual but this time around I have some bits to disagree with.😊

I had a lot to say on the last two weeks but couldn't as I got really busy with a couple of side exams and stuff.

So first; sorry for not replying to your previous posts covering the last two weeks. Rest assured I read them and as always liked them a lot.

And second I am compiling my post on the whole fiasco that has been the said time period barring a couple of moments. The excellence that was ep 72 seems to have occurred ages ago.

I will post all of that here along with response to your take on this week. Lots to discuss by the looks of it.
Edited by -Arsal- - 8 years ago
Posted: 8 years ago
My dear,

You know how much I enjoy your comments. So I look forward to them, but when you did not turn up, I knew you simply could not manage it. As for this one, feel free to disagree to anything at all, beginning with my now kinder take on your bete noire, Dansh! I look forward to hearing  from you.

But as for the Rao as Moriarty twist, it is highly artificial and it simply does not hold together. It reminds of another, 20 episode serial of Anurag Kashyap's. Amitabh Bachchan's first TV serial, Yudh.  In an accordion like last episode, they produced the arch villain on the general principle of the least likely character, the heroine's fiance, a chap  called Ajaatashatru,. Now the  problem was that this chap, a simple lawyer, could not by any stretch of the imagination have done 80% of the things/crimes that were attributed  to him in Episode 20. It was all a mess. If Anurag Kashyap can do  something so  lacking in credibility,  what to say of an Utkarsh or an Arvind Babbal?

So I am resigned to a holdall finis, with every loose end crammed in and the whole contraption strapped shut. There are only 40 episodes left, and innumerable strands to tie up, not to speak of our still having no back story for Bhairavi, my MB.

Shyamala (Aunty? Di? I get confused about what I am for whom!😉,

Originally posted by -Arsal-


Solid post as usual but this time around I have some bits to disagree with.😊

I had a lot to say on the last two weeks but couldn't as I got really busy with a couple of side exams and stuff.

So first; sorry for not replying to your previous posts covering the last two weeks. Rest assured I read them and as always liked them a lot.

And second I am compiling my post on the whole fiasco that has been the said time period barring a couple of moments. The excellence that was ep 72 seems to have occurred ages ago.

I will post all of that here along with response to your take on this week. Lots to discuss by the looks of it.
Posted: 8 years ago
^ Awesome post by u, Shyamala Di! 👏
Rao is jst like Moriarty.. 😲 
I nvr expected Rao to be evil.. 
Posted: 8 years ago
My dear,

I like long comments very much, and I am so pleased with yours!

No one could really have guessed that Rao was the Villain No.1, trumping even the Polish Cardinal. Many felt there was something odd about him, but it  was  mostly only a vague suspicion, on the principle  of the least likely person turning out to be the guilty one.

Now, as I have tried to bring out in the first part of this post, making Rao out  to be an international arch villain might sound very dramatic, but it is hardly plausible. The whole twist is full  of holes, and I have flagged some, including a whopper: why did he have Shivanand, his loyal shishya  who would have readily shared all his knowledge about the amrit   with him,  kidnapped and then tortured of 24 years to no purpose? It is utter nonsense.

Anyhow, the writer is king, so we shall have to lump  it!

Yes, I too thoroughly enjoy the 'Veshes and their interactions with Greyerson. It is great fun.

As for MB (Maimuyi-Bhairavi), it is the big boys who should be gratified to be able to work with her, for she is way beyond all of them, both in her special powers (even Rudra, with all his chakras  opened is no match for her) and in her intelligence and strategic and tactical skills!

Shyamala (Di? I am not sure what I am to whom!)

Originally posted by MrDarcyfan


Hi Shyamala,
Thanks for the PM. This is an amazing analysis. Yes Rao is Moriarty. I always knew there was something seriously dodgy about this guy. From the time he took Charles home and said he was his long lost grandfather, I was highly suspicious of his true intentions. Then I thought, is he just like Shiva, who is obsessed with the mission of "Save Amrit?" But I was still dubious, and felt his interest WAS in Amrit, but not in saving it, but in claiming it! :) I was proven right!


He turned out to be the Boss of the Bishop and Greyerson's unseen boss! Pretty sinister stuff. Even when they showed that "shadowy" figure with the glasses on? I was thinking..."Is this Rao?" I was right! It is! Now the interesting part is to see how he plays this game. Playing Garud's against the Naga's. He wants to get Amrit from one of them, coz he knows one of them WILL get it. So have allegiances with both sides. Directly with the Garud's by acting as one of their "wise counselors" and indirectly with the Nagas through Greyerson and the Sri-Santh resident Satan's, Devesh and Balivesh. (On an aside, I just love the sarcastic exchanges between, Devesh, Balivesh and Greyerson!). It's too much! Some of the most entertaining parts of the story are brought by these three and their "Chaal-Kapat" discussions! :)

Now of course Leela comes to the Garud's. Bhairavi is with Dansh, playing mind games. Shiva is fully mind controlled by "Vish!". What will happen next? I am honestly waiting with bated breath! This show officially up'd the anti last week and kicked into the next gear! I am now excited for it, the same way when I first saw teenage Rudra and his coming of age. That part of the story with Siddarth Nigam was superb! Even Sima B was amazing as Mai Mui. Now she is Bhairavi, not Mai Mui. She is a different kettle of fish. But her powers are fully functioning. I think she is functioning even above our "Garud Pramuk" coz she is playing major strategy with the big boys now!

Long post, but then I had a lot to say, coz the show just got amazing! :) 


Posted: 8 years ago
Thank you so much, my dear Swetha, for being so unfailingly supportive!

Neither did I, whence the sack cloth and ashes for me!😉

No, my dear, Rao is not  like Moriarty - it is just that Utkarsh wants to pass him off as a Moriarty. I have discussed in this post, in some detail, why this twist makes no sense at all!

Shyamala Di
Originally posted by -Swetha-


^ Awesome post by u, Shyamala Di! 👏
Rao is jst like Moriarty.. 😲 
I nvr expected Rao to be evil.. 
Posted: 8 years ago
What a cracker of a post, dear Shyamala. Thoroughly enjoyed your descriptive analysis of the Dansh- Bhairavi scenes which were a delight to watch. Your post, in turn, does full justice to the excellence of those scenes. Simply Marvellous.⭐️

Rahil Azam has finally got into Dansh's skin. It was a pleasure to watch him Thursday. As for Seema Biswas, one has run out of superlatives. I'm presently a tad disappointed with the way Rudr's character has developed?! so far. GR must be tired of exploring different shades of looking helpless, clueless, or both! 


About the Rao 'fiasco', I reserve judgement in the hope there may be a further flipflop in his persona! This may remind you of sundry straws being desperately clutched, but it's a wild hope that I'm not willing to let go of...😳
Edited by happychappy - 8 years ago

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