MIH season 2 has upped the ante from the last season. It’s grander, harder-hitting, and reeks of all things lush and plush.
MIH 1 was intrinsically raw and earthy, aiming to establish the base for the very real, flawed principal characters of 2 wedding planners and their team, giving the viewers a peek into their background stories, the reasons, and the explanations. The second season lets them bloom and shine and the new additions to the star cast, esp. Mona Singh enhance the flow of the narrative.
Each episode focuses on a wedding and addresses a relevant contemporary issue (obsession with fair skin, caste prejudice, polygamy, domestic violence, etc.) The entire wedding planning team’s personal lives’ complications are interwoven beautifully with the main theme.
MIH 2 is enriched with high production quality, haute couture, the glossy, slightly wayward, unconventional lifestyle of the rich and their myriad issues, while also scrutinizing sans any judgment, the prevailing social dogmas, the biases and the hypocrisy.
The main star cast of the previous season outperforms each other. In Shobhita’s carefully cultivated persona of a well-groomed lady (Tara), we see a social climber striking it rich with the top industrialist scion, Jim Sarbh (owning his role with aplomb.) She reveals her vulnerability and inner conflicts as well as her sharp claws.
Arjun Mathur as Karan represents the repressed gay community hiding in a closet for fear of filial and social censure. Legal acceptance has made little progress as the general mindset remains archaic treating LGBT as a freak lot. Case in point is the new addition to the cast, a real-life transgender who is ostracised unapologetically by the majority.
The voiceover at the end of each episode by the MIH photographer Kabir is deep and reflective, unraveling the myth of an emotion called love and a ceremony called marriage.
MIH takes ingenious digs at the high society with their Pandora’s box full of skeletons, simultaneously reflecting upon the aspirational middle and lower middle-class India, the so-called 'wannabees' who envy and despise the elites in equal measure.
Sound complicated? Well, that’s MIH for you.
Kudos to the magic of accomplished directors to pull off complex relationships, many of which may still raise eyeballs in middle-class society. There’s substance in style, soul in gloss, and bleak reality lurking beneath the ‘oh so beautiful’ exterior of MIH. It’s funny, it’s thought-provoking, it touches you at some base level, and challenges your sensibilities to mull over the cruel world we are living in! A world where anything different from our established and understood code of conduct is viewed as ‘deviant,’
Any cons, if I get down to dissect an otherwise compelling web series, are the excesses in styling, in set designs, in the ostentatious veneer, in graphically depicting gay sex, in the frequent use of the f… word without so much as batting an eyelid. (How it’s being normalised in all OTT content!) I wish the titans of show biz realise that being understated is an art too, and, at times, subtlety works just as fine!
Eye candy it may be but there’s enough bite in the shiny, multi-layered world of MIH and its characters to make it binge-watch worthy!
