BIG B AND THE SMALL SCREEN
Amitabh Bachchan created TV history when he dared to appear on the small screen for the first time – to host a show called Kaun Banega Crorepati in 2000. Can he spin the same magic again, this time with his debut in a fiction serial, Yudh (Sony), made under the creative supervision of Hindi cinema’s enfant terrible Anurag Kashyap? More importantly, can the show resurrect the gasping-for-breath world of television fiction? I sincerely hope so. Anil Kapoor made a great beginning last year with his adaptation of the American show, 24, though disappointingly, there’s no sign of a Season 2 this year. You could say Yudh is a family drama – but it’s like no other family drama you’ve seen on desi TV. (If you’re still thinking pancaked women in wedding-type sarees bickering over laddoos in the kitchen, you’re way off the mark). Here, the protagonist is Yudh, a principled businessman and builder, a man so besieged with problems that Shakespeare could have written these lines for him instead of Hamlet: “When sorrows come they come not single… but in battalions.” For a start, Yudh (played by Amitabh Bachchan) is suffering from a terminal neurological disorder. As if that was not enough, he faces one punishing blow after another – his personal life is fraught (he has a second family, including a beloved daughter no one knows about), his son is something of a concern (a city boy fond of the good things of life, under the pernicious influence of a maternal uncle), he is being targeted by a corrupt police commissioner and an equally corrupt, unscrupulous rival builder, plus he’s just made an enemy of a powerful news channel editor. There are shocking murders, secret CDs, mysterious machinations, dangerous Maoists, the works.
It’s a tense and sombre show. As events start closing in around Yudh, you sense a looming, threatening darkness. For a serial where so much happens in every episode, the pace is a bit slow. But this also lends the show a certain haunting quality, which suits the story. Amitabh Bachchan, who is in practically every frame, holds the show together with a presence and power distilled over his decades of experience. But pretty much everyone on the show is good – whether it is the brilliant actor Zakir Hussain who plays Yudh’s close friend and associate Anand, or actordirector Tigmanshu Dhulia who plays an unsavoury politician, or even newbie Pavail Gulati who plays Yudh’s spoilt son Rishi. My only quibble: the show is allegedly set in Delhi, but I couldn’t see any evidence of location shooting in the city. Apart from a few random establishing shots showing road signs or the Metro, the serial seems to have been shot mostly indoors on sets.
And finally. I know there’s no getting away from this – sooner or later, someone will begin asking about the kind of ratings Yudh has got, to determine whether it can be called a success or not. That would be depressing. This show is not about ratings. It’s about raising the bar on TV and giving viewers something radically different from what they’ve been used to for over 10 years. They may take time to get used to new stories, or to new ways of telling stories – but frankly, that’s the only way forward for the TV industry. All other roads will only take you back.