The story revolves around the trials and tribulations of a frail, little, sweet girl-next-door, Maanya Sharma, who wanted to be a dancer but is forced to become a police officer to realise an unfulfilled dream in her family.
Actually, Maanya's dad (in a brief cameo by Akshay Anand) was a police officer, who died in action. Ever since grandpa Sharma who was a constable in his prime, played by one expression Qazir (in the veteran actor's most sketchily conceived performance till date), has been living the life of a psycho paralytic. All his physical faculties are intact but he doesn't use them opting for an inert existence that's spent looking into the vacuum or albums of his dead son.
But he suddenly comes back to life, one fine day when he sees Maanya in a policeman's outfit, though the latter was just enacting a role in a neighbourhood play. The poor, little girl under emotional pressure decides to let go of her dream admission into a dance academy and opt for the police academy instead. And the next day you have the dancer in the making smarting over a letter granting her admission into a police academy. If that was a bit too much to digest, once in the academy, she has to contend with a devilish set of batch mates whose only thrill at the moment seems to be ragging a fellow classmate to nuts.
Maanya's suffer story meanwhile continues as one sees her slog it out in a calling far from her dreams and abilities just to bring life into the vegetative existence of a grandpa in delusion. Could someone please show the soap's writers Taare Zameen Par? Anyways as the protagonist carries on with her training, falling and failing, to fructify the unfulfilled dreams her grandpa, one fails to understand why our soap sagas in the drama genre have to be eternal sob stories. If struggle stories make a good narrative then make one; but why churn insufferable suffer stories? Maanya's fate is no different from your average suffering bahu on telly, only the perpetrators here don't wear saris or look like sasu-maas.
Salaam Zindgi's premise of a story revolving around the making of a lady police officer holds ample promise in the glut of saas-bahu inanities for the sheer novelty of the idea. But this is no Udaan. Pariva Pranati's Maanya act is earnest, but it's not a patch on Kavita Choudhury's Kalyani Singh, and for no fault of the actress. The character's conceptualisation itself is flawed but it's not at a point of no redemption either.
That's why I won't dismiss the show entirely, as one can still spot occasional moments of hope in acts like that of the police academy's lady police instructor, Meghna Malik (in another wow role with some good lines post Har Ghar Kuch Kehta Hai) or in the character of Maanya's mother (Anita Kulkarni), whose humanness surprisingly comes forth in her selfish urgings to Maanya to put self before sacrifice. Abhay Vakil as Maanya's potential love interest, Akash, adds one more variant to his many cute and naughty lover boy acts on TV. Sachin Khurana as the chauvinistic police academy deputy head is effective.
Verdict
If you are not a stickler for authenticity, the show's truly different context and content might appeal.
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