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There are only 2 things in India that give social mobility - a solid, elitist education (like Radhika Apte's character) or marriage (like Tara Khanna). Made In Heaven does this well.
Made In Heaven is a good show because it brings out nuances that dramas depicting Indian lives almost never do.
Think of the moment when Jazz asks the Bai to clean properly and she retorts back. It’s so real. It’s the middle class need to be hierarchically superior to socioeconomically lower classes. Then the upper class Delhi way of throwing shade by calling out the area (oh, Dwarka, metro must have made it easy no). The irate feelings of Radhika Apte’s younger brother who calls getting his caste known as “coming out” as a quota student.
Anyone who calls it a show about rich people getting married obviously doesn’t know what they are talking about. Marriage is a great backdrop because our collective social anxieties, biases and manipulations come to life because of the social mobility marriage affords. And how well these have been shown!
There are only 2 things in India that give social mobility – a solid, elitist Education (like Radhika Apte’s character) or marriage (like Tara Khanna). Made In Heaven does this well, navigating so many lives of (largely) so many women and doing it in such a contemporary way!
What spurs a woman to blindly settle with a married man (Kalki)?
What does it mean to be a provider to a family and a business owner as a woman (Sobhita)?
Why do women settle for what clearly doesn’t work for them (Mrunal)?
Why do women not want to live with men who are “socially good enough” (Dia)?
Why does wanting love come with humiliating disgrace till we find the one (Trinetra)?
How do women show resilience within the cage they’re given and rebuild their lives (Mona)?
All these arcs stuffed together work well.
Very few Indian weddings go the way of Shweta Tripathi from season 1. Most are in the zone like Neelam’s own (incompatible) or her son’s are (transactional where the girl has been taught to dream about settling down).
It is a brilliant show (even if that means seeing Bvlgari and Zomato placements…!) that explores how families sabotage themselves, and relationships break and repair. It’s so worth it. Even Kabir’s voice over is worth it because it shows the elitist need to intellectualize, but not really do anything to change things.
Published here first.
Ayushi Mona co-leads Broke Bibliophiles Bombay Chapter, India's first offline reader driven community. She is a poet and writer who evangelizes Indian writing in English at the India Booked podcast and has also read more...
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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