POWERED BY CHAOS
Ashim Ahluwalia’s Class on Netflix is a highly bingeable whodunit that offers a glimpse into the messy lives of teenagers
Early in Ashim Ahluwalia’s Netflix series Class, an affluent character walks into her classmate’s dark, dilapidated home and exclaims, “Wow, so much mood ya!”, before whipping out her phone to photograph it. Another dismisses the Black Lives Matter and Dalit Lives Matter movements as ‘“shit only na”, adding, “Stories banake post karne ke liye sab theek hai [these things work for social media] but the reality of things is just not that simple.”
An adaptation of the hit Spanish show Elité (2018—), Class delves into the deep divide between the haves and have-nots, while also exploring themes of caste injustice, Islamophobia and queer repression. “The Spanish show deals with class in the European sense of the word. Making a show in India about class and not interacting with the idea of caste would have been very naïve,” says showrunner Ahluwalia, whose past credits include Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s 2012 Miss Lovely, which won two National Awards.
The show is set in the fictional Hampton International School, New Delhi, which has boys who exude the classic ‘tu jaanta hai mera baap kaun hai [do you know who my father is?]’ vibe and girls whose lives begin and end on the ‘gram’. The status quo is not just broken but shattered when three students from low-income families—Dheeraj Valmiki (Piyush Khati), Balram ‘Balli’ Sehrawat (Cyaawal Singh) and Saba Manzoor (Madhyama Segal)—are given admission at Hampton when their government school is razed after a suspicious fire. This dangerous mix threatens to reveal a sinister plot and results in a student’s death on the school premises.
Apart from Gurfateh Pirzada, most of the show’s fantastic young cast are first-time actors. “I was very clear that I didn’t want any famous faces. I like directing actors who are completely fresh because they bring a kind of vulnerability and reality to the role,” he says. The flip side, though, meant many retakes because “actors don’t know their lines or even know where to stand”. Ahluwalia’s background in documentary filmmaking prepared him to roll with the punches. “I’d just let the actors do their thing and let the camera roll. The scene of Balli taking off his shirt and flexing his pecs in the first episode was one such accident.” Also outstanding are Zeyn Shaw as Veer, the heir apparent to a real estate conglomerate and Anjali Sivaraman as his troubled sister Suhani.
Ahluwalia also deviates from the source material to focus on the protagonist’s families. “I thought it’d be interesting to explore what the parents of these kids are like. The behaviour of the parents explains why these kids are so crazy.” While there are cliches of the genre, there is a lot that Ahluwalia, along with the writers—Rajesh Devraj, Bhaskar Hazarika, Raghav Kakkar, Kashyap Kapoor and Kersi Khambatta—and co-directors Gul Dharmani and Kabir Mehta get right. The world of Class is both gritty and opulent and looks lived-in. The use of social media, breezy dialogues and music anchors the show in the here and now. ■
MOST OF THE CAST OF CLASS ARE FIRST-TIME ACTORS