MahāRavivāra episodes are supposed to give the audience a treat: a long-awaited wedding or sports match or a romantic surprise.
What was the point of this MahāRavivāra episode for Piratīçā Vanavā Urī Peṭalā?
All of the scenes were quite ordinary and there was no unifying theme. Muddy Nanda ... Balaram challenges Arjun to arm-wrestle ... Vishvambhar doesn't realize that Savi is manipulating Krishna'i to feel sorry for her and move her into the outhouse with Dipu and Çamaki ... Arjun sends Vidyadhar off to a kīrtana ... Arjun calls Savi "Miss Vaśilā" one more time ... Dipu tells Savi what to expect of each member of the Kawathekar family, and the action repeatedly jumps to the next morning and back to last night ... Shali pretentiously drinks grinti (green tea) ... Mona Māmī practises sorcery ... Balaram and Arjun prepare to arm-wrestle.
On Monday's episode, the action continues to jump back and forth jarringly, from the long arm-wrestling scene in the morning to Dipu's narration last night, and on to the Kawathekars lining up to receive their monthly allowance at 10 am.
How does Dipu know the family's individual quirks already, let alone their monthly routine? He started work as their cook maybe a day before Vishvambhar took Savi to Vidyadhar and Arjun for the clerk's job, which was the day Çamaki moved in with him. This is just the next night and morning after. The family didn't have time to notice that the cook who arrived without a daughter suddenly has one living with him, but the cook had plenty of time to study the family!
Obviously setting up another misunderstanding for Savi, Arjun tells Priya that she won't go to college anymore, starting today. Why, because she was assaulted at the temple? Yes. "But that's not my fault!" Priya protests, and Savi grumbles to herself that Arjun is depriving his sister of college instead of tracking down the perverts. Unlike the earlier misunderstandings, this one isn't elucidated for the audience in the same episode.
When we find out that Arjun has arranged private lessons for Priya, or whatever, will that make everything all right? Arjun is still disrupting his sister's routine and telling her to live in fear, even if it's only temporary. He is still denying Priya a healthy experience of face-to-face dialogue with peers and instructors. If the family that rules the town reacts to two incidents of sexual misconduct in a public place by keeping Priya at home, how will anyone less powerful stand up for realistic solutions to make public places safe for women and girls?
Arjun making Priya cry bothers me more than his brusque treatment of everyone else in the earlier scenes where Savi got only one side of the story.
When Arjun belt-whipped the union leader and told him, "You're a poor man? Then behave like one!" because Arjun somehow knew about the man's plot to assassinate Dipesh, that was outrageous entertainment, and I could accept that Arjun actually respects labourers when Savi isn't watching. Arjun's justification for injuring Ganapat's hand with a fork, that Ganapat should feel what his victim felt, makes sense primitively.
In the real world and in fiction, rich people do shout at workers for being sick, and busy people do tell suicidal strangers that they don't care. It's terrible, but it's par, and that's why someone with empathy gets credit for being a better person. So, when Arjun acts callous and then flips to speaking on behalf of hardworking commoners, I accept that he's strict but his heart is in the right place.
The situation with Priya is troublesome because Arjun isn't dominating strangers this time; he's asserting superiority as brother over sister in the context of a household in which males and females function in non-overlapping spheres. Arjun runs a bank and a factory that Vishvambhar used to mismanage; Vidyadhar runs an orphanage; Balaram leads a gang ... but Krishna'i and Vishvambhar's wife are homemakers, and when Arjun asks Nanda what she has done to be recognized as thoralī sūna, he only talks of cooking and housekeeping, not a career or charity work. Shali is another stereotype of image-obsessed idle rich women. Priya, who is intelligent enough to analyze Arjun and compose bad poetry, is labelled ardhavaṭa by Dipu, implying that the creatives want her vivacious innocence to come across as childlike to justify Arjun's paternalism.
The show's promo for MahāRavivāra had Balaram, Vidyadhar, Priya, Vishvambhar and his wife all hanging their heads in front of Arjun for their allowances. Since that scene hasn't happened as of Monday, the promo was false advertising.
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