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Heartstopper S2

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

I finished watching the second season of Heart Stopper in one night. There are some wonderful moments in the season, and I had loved the first one. The second season was a worthy follow up. When we began watching the second season, my partner said, “They are going to break up. What else are they going to show?” That made me think. First, he was right in thinking that, because of added viewership, the scriptwriters tend to make the lead couple go through breaks. Purely to create drama. Second, I began thinking whether relationships, it does not matter if they alternate or straight, must necessarily go through break-ups eventually.

I watched the second season with trepidation, after that. I will just say one thing that I found myself disbelieving. Mostly every character, in the series turns out to be a representation of the LGBTQIA+ banner. Even the faculty members turn out to have alternate sexualities. I began thinking, damn, this is an academic environment that I never got around to even knowing of, much less experiencing, when I was a teenager. Someone online said, there must have been gay teachers, when I was studying. True, but I never knew of one who was out and proud of themselves, the way the ones in the series are depicted. Jealous much!

What then happens in the second season? Spoiler alert right away, so don’t read further if you do not like spoilers.

There is no break up. There are several issues that come up in any relationship, post the commitment. The idea of the ‘happily ever after’ works at the end of books and movies. What happens after the marriage or the commitment or the kiss during the sunset, no one really wishes to talk about or address. Thankfully, a good series takes note of this and tries to understand the vagaries of an established relationship in its episodes.

Particularly, for Nick and Charlie, there is the foremost dilemma of coming out to friends and family. Charlie was outed, Nick is not. There is the issue of image and prestige and social disgrace or acceptance. Nick keeps talking about his being bisexual whenever he speaks openly about his relationship. It seems like a cover for him, as it is implied that he is not ‘as gay as Charlie’. Of course, bisexuality is a part of the LGBT spectrum, but in most cases, it is used as a cover-up. In a committed relationship with a gay man, another man can profess his bisexuality. However, does the bisexuality imply that he will be with another person of the opposite sex eventually? If yes, then the break-up is inevitable. If no, then why mention the bisexuality? I understand the need to be imperative about the difference in sexuality, but what effect would this have on a partner/Charlie’s mind.

The process of coming out is a tough one. We who have taken steps to come out have known this to be true. It is an intense process. We come to terms first with ourselves and our difference from mainstream society. We then have to choose to whom to come out. Understanding their personalities becomes a necessity – and still there is a chance that we may not understand them at all. No matter how hard we try. Because we do not know what their response would actually be. So, we begin to test ground – by implication and by strategy. So, on top of the anxiety of wanting acceptance, we have to also understand what the other person is and what their response will be. Planning becomes necessary in most cases. Stress factors compound.

The really thoughtful angle that Heart Stopper brings out, is the fact that Nick’s coming out doesn’t just affect him. It also plays on the peace of mind of Charlie. He doesn’t want to lose Nick, and so he wants the coming out process to go easy for Nick. This is despite the fact that Charlie’s coming out was foisted on him by circumstance and not his own choice. He relives the bullying and the mental torture that he underwent earlier. His mental equilibrium begins to topple.

Charlie’s mental state is already frayed by his past. With the coming out process of Nick, his own peace of mind gets further destabilised, and it manifests in the resurgence of an eating disorder. The scene when he confesses to Nick about his state of mind is a tender one. One of the best scenes in the season. He opens his heart and talks to Nick about self-harm and his abstinence from food. Nick realises even Charlie’s closest friends do not realise this about him. When this comes about, people like me can understand how Charlie chooses to make Nick his first priority throughout the school term. He wants Nick’s coming out process and time in the relationship to be as smooth as possible. The chance of Nick unravelling is unbearable to Charlie – because he has had a first-hand experience of it.

Technically speaking, the emotional intensity of the relationship is very well portrayed. The problem I have had with it is how two teenage boys who are attracted to each other have not progressed to any form of a sexual act. They refrain from making love. This is another angle that may be brought up in season three. Because as I see it, Nick is the one uncomfortable with the sexual part of the relationship. He is not at all ready, and this brings me to the point of how he stresses his bisexuality each time he talks to people. So maybe, my partner is right and eventually they may break up. But the romantic in me thinks may be not. It is just his fear of trying out something he never thought he would be attempting. But – teenage boy – raging hormones – attraction – empty room – Paris – and yet, nothing. (Except for a very small love bite.)

One particular scene made me envious. When Nick and Charlie walk hand in hand in Le Marais, I felt truly envious. I grew up gay, in India, where until September 2018, being gay was actually a criminal offence, punishable by 10-years imprisonment. It was a scene where they realise what being mainstream felt like. They could hold hands and walk out in public, where no one questioned their love. It felt good – a place where hate and discrimination faded away under the rainbow umbrellas. One thing that makes a good story: its ability to touch the hearts of people, no matter the age or the orientation or the country. This moment did it for me more than any other.

The other characters have linear graphs. With the exception perhaps of Isaac Henderson, who has a sexual identity crisis but overcomes it on his own. It is a poignant portrayal of asexuality, which in itself is hard to explain in an otherwise over sexualised world. The other character of note that seems to be at odds with himself is Ben Hope. One can never truly understand whether he has grown as a person or remains his older narcissistic self. There was an interesting angle between Youssef and Ajayi, the teachers who have a same-sex relationship, in the interim of the school trip. But it’s not greatly touched upon, since it seems to mirror the Nick and Charlie relationship.

An honourable mention for one of my favourite actors, Olivia Coleman, who plays the part of Nick’s mom so effortlessly. Thibault de Montalembert has a good cameo as Nick’s dad. It’s quite a typical scenario. But well-played. All in all, the season has set the groundwork for the next season that has already been green lit by Netflix. I think that one will be a far more interesting and passionate one. However, I hope the romance sustains through all odds. It’s a healthy go-to for questing teens and romantic souls of all ages.

Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

I knew I’d like the movie. Because I am an Alia fan. Because I love family dramas. Because I enjoy Karan Johar’s direction and vision. I loved Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. And I wasn’t surprised that I ended up loving this movie, too.

Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani has all the masala and the twists for a Bollywood movie. And it feels like a hit without a single macho punch being pulled anywhere on screen. It also hit close to home for very personal reasons. There are simply too many similarities right now between my life and various episodes in the film. I think that’s important for a good movie. And that’s why I loved it – because I connected with it.

The story is simple. An intelligent, self-made, independent, educated woman falls in love with a rich, loud, narcissistic, lovable, carefree man. Families realise the disparity and the lovers decide to test themselves in each other’s spaces for a few months.

Spoiler alert.

In the midst of it all, you throw in a septuagenarian romance that actually brings the couple together in the first place and then links them further. Then there is the antagonist: a matriarch who governs with an iron hand (already done in Ram Leela with far greater flair) but this doesn’t include physical but emotional and mental violence. There is a house governed by ambition and a quest for material prosperity. The other house is governed by emancipation and a quest for intellectual betterment and acceptance.

The movie doesn’t just tackle the romance and the odds of the hero and heroine. But interlinked within the families, each character struggles to find a voice or realises that the voice they were using could be biased at best and cruel at worst, as well.

The film has both Pride and Prejudice. It’s a subtle encapsulation of how people look down upon people, how we form prejudices based on past experiences and why it is important to realise our own trauma and make peace with due apologies. Every person in the movie is flawed. And growth happens with the realisation of these flaws and seeking to better one’s self through mature, self-affirming decisions.

The only abrupt change that seemed jarring was the write-off they gave Dhanlakshmi, Jaya’s character. But in a way, it was for the best, because it was in keeping with her character that the change wasn’t radical or real, but implied off-screen.

Dharmendra and Jaya Bachchan are brilliantly cast in characters just made for them. Shabana Azmi steals the screen when she is on it, as the woman who experienced true love for a few days that lasted a lifetime. She battled abuse and raises a son who is different from the typical idea of what a man should be and do, in India. This is brave (uncannily) and well-handled by Karan. The scene where Alia’s father is ridiculed speaks to every boy who grows up being different, in a patriarchal society. To exemplify this, Ranveer’s Rocky wears an outfit that’s vomit green as he laughs with the crowd. I noticed it, Karan.

The monologue Rocky gives addressing the ridicule Rani’s father faced, after a Kathak performance, is worth an honourable mention. It speaks of the need to understand not just what is considered woke in the modern day world but also the dangers of cancel culture that circles around it. For those who say that never happens to men who are into classical dance, you truly either live in a different world or choose to ignore the problems that are very much around in this world.

Rani’s character excels in her confrontation with Rocky’s father. It reminded me of the confrontation Reena Roy has with Lalita Pawar, in Sau Din Saas Ke. But there, there is the confrontation between two women. That happens with Jaya Bachchan and Alia, too. But what is actually different is Rani, a woman, standing in all her glory, dressed in Red at a Durga Puja and confronting a patriarch. The scene resonates because she stands there with no trace of fear. It is a juxtaposition to the scene where Rocky laughs at her father for being who he is. She stands with the frustration of all liberal mentality that reaches a crescendo at that point. It teeters on violence. The dangers of that happening is almost as bad as the despotic power that Dhanlakshmi holds over her entire family. Almost. But not quite.

The costumes were extensions of the characters. Rani was mostly dressed in the most beautiful sarees, since Sridevi’s performance in English Vinglish. Red being her colour and the implication of red being the colour of true love and passion, given it being the colour of the most sensitive character, of Rocky’s grandfather, essayed by Dharmendra. It is perhaps the colour that flares out when poetry is ousted by industry. Rocky thus wears a riot of colours, because he has it all in him and Ranveer can carry off all of them because he knows he can. He tends to wear black and white, when he is with his family. Do notice that.

I don’t know if I am the only one who felt so, but Alia looked a tad uncomfortable in the love scenes with Ranveer. If she is in love with the man, there can’t be a discomfort in the intimacy. In some shots, she just seems to be pulling away rather than pulling in. For the character of Rani to fall in love with the character of Rocky, there can be no chance of a lack of physical chemistry. And by the interval, the love has to have cemented enough to be there in their eyes. Ranveer has it, Alia loses out here. The character of Jaya Bachchan too for all her superiority complex just allows her husband and his lover to meet up? For a woman who walks out of a Durga Aarti, how does she sit by in discomfort when her husband obviously is being intimate with another woman? I found this a bit jarring.

There are a multitude of old song covers. Mostly from a favourite film of mine, Hum Dono. And the songs set to the OST of the movie are not particularly engaging but they work for the tempo of the movie. My favourite is actually not the title song but Ve Kamleya. (Must throw in an aside here: the movie begins with a dance number, which I quite liked, but it’s not the song that is worth a mention – I grinned when I saw all the nepo-babies make cameo appearances in the song. Tongue-in-cheek there, Mr Johar.)

All in all, I end with my personal opinion that Karan Johar has created a wonderful movie. He has applied himself once again to creating a family drama for the modern world and he has succeeded. Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani is exemplary for the fact that it speaks of breaking away from issues that do not truly matter and finds shaky ground in a world that is itself trying to find a place for each person’s uniqueness.

The Blood of the Covenant Is Thicker Than the Blood of the Womb

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

Yesterday, my partner showed me my mom’s WhatsApp status. She had put up the picture of my sister and her husband up there with the caption, “my daughter and son-in-law” with pink hearts as exclamations. The picture was a sweet one, where my sister was cuddled with her husband – and the emotion was a simple one my mom expressed. It was affection and pride. It was a charming manifestation of what straight people feel about love and family.

I felt a pang of remorse and a prickling rejection. The man I have spent 23 years with, Anand, never once featured with me on any one of my mother’s status updates. He has been with me since the year 2000. He has handled every family problem along the way. Furthermore, he has met the needs of all the elderly people in my family and done, many a time, what even my sister and I have failed to do for them. My aunt, Goodie, loved and appreciated him more than any other in this family – and he treated her like a mother. No surprise there.

But he is still gay. In love with me, another gay man. We have no true measure of our relationship except for the one we both share in private. Our love gets no label. It gets no name. I am fine with that. I am not fine when to respect and appreciate it, others must understand it in the structure of their world view. If there is no marriage, there is no justification for love between two people. If there is no following the codes of society, society chooses to nullify the relationship.

I am even fine with the rejection that I face and will face from society. I owe them no justification. I am not fine with the ones who say they love me and have been a part of my relationship and not been okay with its manifestation. I am not fine with the ones I love who have used this relationship when they needed to use it, and then discarded its worth when faced with the questions society could ask. I am not fine with it.

That being said, I want to talk directly to my LGBTQ+ brethren now. When I fell in love for the first time, I thought it would last forever. I was 20. I ideally believed that love would conquer all. But over the months that passed, I made my lover my first priority. I was strong in my belief that he loved me like I loved him. I won’t go into the complexities of love and how strange it can actually be. I will, however, write of how a gay man saw our relationship.

He said to me, casually, one evening, “Blood is always going to be thicker than water.”

It took me aback. Here, I was making him my first priority. For him, I would have left my family and journeyed with him to his country, if he so desired. But to him, I was never a first priority. I was never family. I was not connected by blood. To be absolutely crude, ejaculating inside him would never count. It would never result in a baby. A being that would contain both our different bloods. A manifestation of what comprised of family.

(I will not get into the fact that even wives going to their husband’s homes, are treated as the Other. The ones living on the periphery of the innermost circles of what is construed as blood relations. Spouses, by default, in the straight world, are family in the eyes of the law, but in the eyes of the true family, still very much outsiders. There is no shared history, except for the ones marriage begins to make. There are divorces. There are separations. There are no links, by blood, that cannot be easily severed. Even there. But I won’t talk in detail about the straight world. Because in the gay world, we do not even have the choice of legal representation. We do not have the right to marry, before god and the rest of the clans, and prove to the Law of the Land that family ties can be formed with the blessing of society.)

So, in the gay relationship, I come into, if I choose to override the fact that we are not linked by blood, my lover becomes my spouse because I feel and think it so. But – and this is a big but – if my own lover thinks blood is thicker than water, the relationship is doomed from the get-go. For who else do I count upon when society builds up its stacks against us? When those with common blood decide to call upon its worth, my lover has to decide that blood isn’t the final calling. Love is. Until then, I will only be the lover. Never a spouse. And most definitely, never family.

When my first love said. “Blood is thicker than water”, he quoted what he felt was true. Heinrich der Glîchezære’s wrote this in the poem “Reinhart Fuchs” which he composed in 1180. “I moreover hear it said,” he writes, “family blood isn’t demolished by water.” He was writing this to mean that even if your family lived over the ocean, separated by leagues of water, the bonds of blood would keep them bound together. You might expect this saying to have arisen at such a time when Germanic people were migrating north, leaving their family behind on continental Europe. My first love was from South Africa, and he had come to India to study. Here, it seemed quite apropos. And true to form, once he left India, despite making promises to return for me, he never did. He broke my heart and made me realise my love was not stronger than his blood bond.

As gay people, we are often ostracised for who we are. Our parents reject us. Our siblings spurn us. We are not given a modicum of respect for who we biologically are, many, many times. Most of the abuse we get starts from within the family. How, then, does blood become thicker than water? We must come to realise this, and the sooner we do, the sooner can emancipation truly begin. Because emancipation comes from thought – it comes first from within, then from without. We have ample examples from our most beloved and revered stories. They manifest from truth.

In the end, I would like to quote a proverb from the Bible.

“One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin,
but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.”
– Proverbs 18:24

This proverb was further used by Henry Clay Trumbull, to create a twist in the saying people quote to me. He writes, “the blood of the Covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” This means that people who make a blood-bond or blood-pact become more bonded than brothers who shared a womb. “The saying means that chosen bonds are more significant than the bonds with family or ‘water of the womb’. More directly, it means that relationships you make yourself are far more important than the ones that you don’t choose.”

Over time, I have begun to realise this to be true for me, because I know this is what I believe in my heart. I do not preach to those who choose the family they were born into over the family that they choose for themselves. I merely state this: If I choose to make someone my family, I do so with the complete definition of love. I am not obliged to love them because they are bonded to me by blood. I choose to love them of my own Free Will. I manifest this bond by love. For me, this love lasts for a lifetime. Being bonded by blood is a happenstance. I know this because my father never loved me, we were just connected by blood. But the man I have been with for the past 23 years, has stood by me, and given me more love than my father ever did. We do not share a blood bond. We just share love.

In my head and heart, that is what truly matters.