Sachchi, Laakhon mein EK!

Streaming on: Amazon Prime

Image Courtesy: imdb.com

Watching Laakhon Mein Ek reminded me of a street vendor making sev puri. For those unfamiliar with the process, the vendor takes a crisp puri, adds some mashed potato, various chutneys and tops it all with chopped onions, coriander, and sev. This process is generally repeated six times, and you have a plate of sev puri ready. It’s a simple dish, elevated by just the right quantity of toppings.

Laakhon Me Ek is just like a plate of sev puri - a series of eight episodes with a classic storyline that is uplifted with good actors, their well-written backstories and most importantly, the makers’ clarity of thought.

In the spirit of clarity, I’d like to disclose that I haven’t watched season one of Laakhon Mein Ek - being an erstwhile engineering student myself, I felt that it’d hit a little close to home. Lucky for me,Season 2 - which is about how an honest doctor finds herself engulfed in the corrupt, toxic relationship between local leaders, government hospitals and drug suppliers - is completely independent of the first season. Going by the trend, I predict that the third season will be about lawyers :-)

After defying a local leader, Dr Shreya Pathare (Shweta Tripathi Sharma), a bold, idealistic junior doctor in the government hospital in Sambhaji nagar, Maharashtra, is posted to a village, Sitlapur, to conduct a free cataract eye camp for the resistant and disinterested villagers. The rest of the series pleats Dr Pathare’s efforts in Sitlapur with medical suppliers and politics, both inside and outside the hospital.

Image Courtesy: imdb.com

Although each of the characters in the series is of vital importance and gets his/her own backstory, Shweta Tripathi Sharma gets the lioness’ share. It is indeed wonderful how the creators managed to get the character right, down from her costumes, to her method of venting out her frustration over the phone, to her false reassurances to her father. Even the costumes for Dr Pathare reflect her mental state - her tops mostly remain in the blue and white zone, but get colorful when she gets confident. Her character goes from a confident, courageous and surefooted village outsider to a shattered, disheartened and betrayed woman over the course of the series. The finale is particularly bleak and despite having little to no dialogue, Tripathi Sharma manages to make the viewer really feel for her through the body language and expressions. After a glimmer of false hope, the series ends on a thought-provoking, depressing note.

One of the highlights of this series is its montages. From the comedic ones of Dr Pathare’s day-to-day life set to rustic music in the initial episodes to the montage of a funeral in the middle of the series in absolute silence to the cavalcade of cataract operations in the penultimate episode, these montages do a splendid job of breaking the monotony of heavy scenes by doing away with dialogues. The stunning light work and the realistic production design transports the viewer into the village from the get-go. The scenes in the episode ‘Lanka Dahan’ where the story of Ramayana (in a song format) run parallel with the issue of supplies shortages is beautiful and left me trying to figure out who the Ravana of this story was . Of course, the answer wasn’t that simple, for, unlike the Ramayana, there was not a single character that was unambiguous. (On an unrelated side note, it seemed rather apt that I watched an episode called Lanka Dahan on Ram Navami :-))

The teeny tiny chink in the armor of this series is the region it is set in. It seemed rather odd to me that in a village set in Maharashtra, people would speak in Hindi, albeit in a Marathi accent, with each other. I still wonder why the creators decided on this particular state, but it’s creative liberty, and using Marathi would make the series seem like a documentary, probably, so let’s leave it at that. I’m just picky.

Verdict: Add this to your ‘must-watch’ list of 2019. And Amazon Prime, you’re on fire!


P.S: Watch out for the man himself, Biswa Kalyan Rath, playing a part of an over-enthusiastic journalist in this show! He seems to be living his dream :-D!

Image Courtesy: imdb.com