The real thing

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Much streaming content gives me the same feeling as desultory swiping on dating apps. Masaba Masaba dispelled my swiping ennui. Let's say, it was the perfect date. I went in with no expectations. I stayed up all night. I laughed a lot. I saw it, but I also felt seen by it. If it's in town again, I'd definitely make plans.

Designed as fiction, the show is based on the real lives of mother and daughter, actor Neena and designer Masaba Gupta, playing themselves. Masaba Masaba begins with a blind item, and one could describe the series as one big blind-item, put out by the subjects of the blind-item themselves. In episode one, Masaba counters the blind-item (about her divorce) by, at first denying it, then owning it. This motif recurs through the show and is also linked to its denouement, where the business of "owning it" is critiqued, unexpectedly, by a deliriously comical Pooja Bedi, who points out that it is a defensive mask, more about avoiding mess, than surviving it.

Question of reality and illusion are age-old themes of life and literature. But in a social media era of scripted authenticity - an idea Masaba Masaba fluidly interweaves into its Instagram referencing narrative - these questions feel far less abstract.

Masaba is charming and funny, but Neena Gupta, as we all already know, is utterly sublime. Every time she's on screen, she brings a whole world with her - where rajma chawal co-exists with being a single unmarried mom; where maternal sweetness co-exists with a sharp desire for work and success. I have been unabashedly in love with Neena Gupta forever, and this series doesn't begin to cover all the reasons why (or give me enough of her).

Other people, like Farah Khan and Kiara Advani, also play themselves in the show, but with ditsy exaggeration, sending themselves up. To not take yourself too seriously, requires confidence, that the quest to be yourself matters. This conviction gives Masaba Masaba a political heart, despite some flaws - it's too benign, everything is solved a bit too easily and we don't get very close to anything. I hope in later seasons it gains the confidence that it can raise the stakes, without losing its lightness.

Masaba Masaba affirms, where Shakuntala Devi, despite its dynamite subject, disappointed: it centres around a mother-daughter relationship, without making motherhood emblematic of womanhood. It also shines where Four More Shots Please, despite its valuable emotional sincerity, felt tacky: it's rooted in a real world, with genuine glamour, instead of a disembodied upmarket-ness.

The show's involvement with the idea of trying to be, or become 'yourself', in work, relationships and life, allows it to present mistakes and breakthroughs as an outcome of one's chosen direction, an outcome of the person you are - rather than defining characters in terms of their adversities or triumphs. Contemporary screen narratives, too often characterise women as symbols - of simplistic political ideas, or marketing defined cultural relatability. They are supposed to represent all women, yaniki, basically be propaganda. But to be a unique character, is the real liberation stories offer - to protagonists and to audiences. They give us that luxurious private freedom - to think about our lives as we think about the characters, finding points of connection, without subsuming our identities, practising the voluptuous joy of being, and becoming, ourselves.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

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