Subject:- 'Apropos NAIDL eps.(6th,7th and 8th Jan. 2010)' by leelaa9.
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Apropos NAIDL ep. (Wednesday, 6th Jan. 2010):-
Sia's actions in taking the bullet knowingly for Ammaji actually make perfect sense. She and Raghav love each other. But they both value something more than their feelings for each other. For Sia, it's her principles. For Raghav, it's his mother. One of them had to prioritise love for the other above all else. It wasn't going to be Raghav for a long while yet.
Sia knows he loves her, and knows even better that he worships his mother. He will do anything - in fact, he has done or been accomplice in much - for his mother, either at her command or for her sake. If he must choose, that it will agonise him to turn away from Sia is proof that he loves her. To expect him to turn away from his mother for Sia... I don't see that happening until rather a great deal of time later, maybe even never.
And Ammaji is the best not of two evils but of all evils. She is all that keeps the Sangwan family's power from being ruined by civil war between the drunkard libertine Dharamveer and Gajendra, the doting husband and father and otherwise ultimate opportunist. Either would leave the rest of the family as beggars.
Whether Joginder's secret is impotency or sterility, Gajender knows it and can use it to blackmail him when the time comes.
Raghav may fight his uncle and middle brother, or he may back down for Joginder's sake if he finds out the secret and Gajender's knowledge of it, or he may simply walk away. He was happy in his cosmopolitan life, and is in Veerpur merely for his mother.
Avtaar would be happy to leave Veerpur with Chanda and dote on any daughters she may bear him.
As for female infanticide, Ammaji simply kept it going. Had she tried to stop a tradition that was already in place and benefited the villagers in terms of prestige (only sons) and money (no dowry to be paid up), she would have never held onto power this long.
Contrary to Sia's rose-tinted citified urbanized understanding, this was never a situation in which the woman in power could do something for other women. Rather, Ammaji is in power because she does nothing for other woman. Her gender is not her weakness. She has a village of patriarchal daughter-killers proud to have her as their chieftain.
If she dies, female infanticide won't stop in Veerpur. It will just be unrestrained by the reins she has held everyone so firmly with.
She protected her devrani Sheela from the worst of Dharamveer's viciousness for years, and dotes on her nephew. Ironically, if she cared less for Avtaar, she would be pleased or at least not care that he had bred no sons, no heirs. But she has plotted and forced him into a second marriage just so that this boy - her nephew - will have a son.
She may dote on Sunehri for having borne the only grandson, and on Rangeeli in hopes of a son for Avtaar.
But it was Sheela and Santosh who, by their devotion to family despite grossly dissatisafactory conjugal lives, earned her trust. In responsibility and prestige as women of the house, they rank after her.
Ammaji will not defend Santosh from the stigma of being barren for fear of exposing Joginder's secret. But her power has ensured that only rarely has Santosh had to endure barbs for it.
And though her trust in Sheela was shattered by the confession that her devrani had been fooling her and everyone else for 18 years - she even much later struck Sheela (and all the other family women in the kitchen) with the whip believing Sheela wanted her dead so badly she let Avtaar eat the poisoned food - affection has gradually limpingly and rather precariously returned.
Sheela has also, from backing Sia in her secret efforts to get 'jiji' jailed, moved on to realize she and her daughter are safe only so long as Ammaji is there to keep Dharamveer leashed. Being the only man in the village to have a daughter for the world to see is not a humiliation he is going to find more acceptable with time.
Chanda knows Avtaar has done far better under his aunt's aegis than he would have under his father's.
Sia understands very little of all this. What she does understand is that if his mother dies, especially when the bodyguard detail was his responsibility, Raghav would shatter. Her desperation was not to save Ammaji or concern for the chaos her death would cause. It was all for Raghav. She didn't race forward to move Ammaji out of the gun's aim. There was no time for it. She could only place herself between the unseen shooter's gun and the woman who had ruined Sia's life (albeit with extreme provocation) but who was dearest to the love of Sia's life.
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Apropos NAIDL ep. (Thursday, 7th Jan. 2010):-
Raghav's reactions throughout the ep. were true to the character as it has been etched.
His love for Sia was proven in the fact that his anguish was for both Ammaji and Sia when he found them lying there, and in those first few moments when his attention was divided between both.
And after that, as well as later, his first concern was his mother and then Sia. The point here is that had he not loved Sia as much as he's capable of loving anyone after his mother, his *only* concern would have been his mother. Dividing his attention away from his mother even a little is, for Raghav, the equivalent of another man yelling his love from the rooftops. Sia is but human. His mother is his god.
His feelings for the rest of his family are absolute and strong but passive. He wants the best for them all and thinks far better of some of them than they deserve. He had been shocked when Ammaji privately told him Gajender may have been the one trying to kill her.
As for Sia... I can't decide whether Sia or "Bairi Piya"'s Amoli is more irritating in the 'preachy-crusader' mode. They talk so many melodramatic platitudes that would be ruinous in the real world that they put Hindi movies to shame.
The perfect kickass ending for this series (hopefully not any time soon) would be Sia changing, not Ammaji.
If Ammaji changes and becomes enlightened, her power will be completely and utterly destroyed. An enlightened Ammaji might as well be dead.
But if Sia were to - grudgingly - set aside her principles and ideals and accept things the way they are in Veerpur, and later Raghav were to get killed, Sia could become hardened and ruthless, start with avenging him and go on to become Ammaji's successor. The next Ammaji, if you will.
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Apropos NAIDL ep. (Friday, 8th Jan. 2010):-
I have absolutely no idea what the devil is going on. But I think - and hope - that Ammaji may turn up alive after Dharamveer and Vora are exposed.
I don't know whether Gajender (a vastly entertaining character to watch. I'd sorely miss him if he were removed.) will slip through the cracks, but it's possible. In the hospital scenes, Dharamveer kept up the stoic countenance throughout. But Gajender went from pretending in the corridor to looking a bit raw with his mother's corpse before him.
leelaa9.
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