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Made in Heaven

I started watching Made in Heaven out of curiosity and found it quite enjoyable. The story is about mega rich desis getting married along with the pomp and circumstance that goes with the territory. The production is slick and the women parade spectacular wardrobes. The vast majority of the men are portrayed as gay, this is interesting until the gratuitous sex scenes detract from the goal of depicting societal hostility towards the community.

No significant character is entirely black or white and that is perhaps what holds the series together. They all have secrets, back-stories and do morally dubious things. Yet they have redeeming qualities. Each of them has a story with enough heft to stand alone. When their complex interactions comes together it produces rich narrative schema. 

Is this "real" India? Most desis would agree that it is not. Real is a very relative term in the Indian context. What this series depicts might be close to reality for a very tiny sliver of the population. The vast majority experiences life that is nothing like what we see here. It is like watching fish in an aquarium. They are not representative of all the fish that exist in the ocean, but they are real too and their placement in an aquarium does not invalidate their reality.  

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