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Story Arc

I started to watch Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper intrigued by the title the first episode in the series. A dude with a name like that and credentials to match in bondage gear and getting ready to kill someone offered and interesting narrative arc. How did Mishra ji get this far is the question a desi such as myself would ask. So I watched the whole thing and went from intrigued to amused to bored and disappointed. Our people love byzantine plot-twists and fancy that their story can be a Mahabharat too. 

Sadly  the outcome of such ambition is a hot mess where the viewer and the writer part ways in the first couple of hours while there is ten more hours of story left to tell. This story had some potential to begin. Right and proper, middle class guy, low level government servant with the usual family troubles, expected to be all around boring turns out to be a great lover to his wife even though he is not able to provide much material. The secret source of her happiness is hard for others to understand because money is forever in short supply. Circumstances push the man over the edge and he becomes a gigolo to pay the bills and eventually fulfill the hopes and dreams of his family. The marriage turns dull and loveless even as the money worries cease. That in itself could be fine storyline showing the transformation of the man and his loved ones, how everyone comes to depend on his "ill-begotten" monies so really there is no returning to the old ways. How, his forays into serving the needs of women change him. 

Maybe his wife turns a blind eye to the whole thing because the needs of the family cannot be met any other way and she consoles herself thinking that she is still the only one he truly loves, the rest are clients so they don't count. But sadly the story takes so many absurd digressions and is full of two-dimensional cartoonish characters, that it becomes yawn-inducing pretty quickly. The decline and fall of Mr. Mishra is precipitated by two opposing forces that act on him - the drag of middle-class values that he cannot overcome and the desire for upward mobility so his kids could have a better life. These two things cannot co-exist within his constraints - something has to change and so it does and in the most dramatic way because its his fastest way to stop being crushed by his financial obligations.

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