Karan Johar and the 55 Pillars of Passion

Recently, I wrote about my experience of watching A Suitable Boy, the Netflix Series based on the book by Vikram Seth. A fellow writer (senior) liked what I had written and advised I should try my hand at writing reviews of popular series on OTT. She suggested I go for a recently telecast reality show featuring the glitter and glamour of Bollywood Wives. Now, I am not much of a television buff and totally not into reality shows. Yet, following the advice I sat down to watch what was not my cup of tea.

And then I decided it was another effort by Karan Johar to sell the poor lives of painfully rich which can be shelved forever. There was nothing much but a shameless attempt to copy some international reality show.

Maybe I have too much snob value as a writer to appreciate this kind of content but recently I got myself a book, which was made into a series once upon a time, when all we had was Doordarshan. I was in school and yet I remember the restrained yet intense acting by the actors (Mita Vashisht and Aman Verma) of the series. They brought to life the characters as real. I am sure the author of the book would have been proud of what she saw.

Pachpan Khambe Laal Deewarein (55 Pillars and Red Walls), the serial which was telecast in the early nineties was way ahead of its times and makes me wonder why did we end up accepting junk in the name of television revolution with the onset of cable network and now more junk with the coming of OTTs?

Pachpan Khambe Laal Deewarein by Usha Priyamvada

I read the book. And if one needs to learn the expression of passion camouflaged by restraint, this is the story to read. It seems so real. It reminds one of those unsaid feelings that have been hidden behind doing the right thing, the worldly vows and duties of fitting into roles and forgetting the woman behind all of it. It is not a sob story of victimhood but an intense work of passion which none of the 18+ content on the OTTs can compete with.

I recall the serial in bits and pieces and after reading the book, I am once again drawn to the urge of binge watching it and going back in time when passion was not about unnecessary sexual content.

The story revolves around a thirty something single woman who is tied by responsibilities to look after parents and siblings but seeks love knowing she can never step out of her boundaries. The inner struggle, the passion and the social dilemma all encompass the intense passion one can feel while reading this story of a time when we were not trapped by the world wide web and love was way more than just emojis on a neon device.

Go ahead, those who can read Hindi, give it a try, who knows it may just rekindle those passions that got covered in the dust of time.