Paatal Lok Webseries Review
Paatal
Lok Web series Review
Paatal Lok opens on the same premise. Four goons area unit comprehended on a bridge over the Yamuna and bimanual over to Inspector Hathiram Chaudhary at Outer Jamuna Paar thana... paatal lok like we're introduced to it in the opening scene.
The universe is divided into three worlds: swarg lok, dharti look, and paatal lok, we are told. The inhabitants of this paatal lok are vermin. Your gangsters, goons, and small-time down-and-out police inspectors like Hathiram Chaudhary whose lives revolve around catching them.
Hathiram's father left him with a past that rears its ugly trunk every time his wife draws analogies with Babpaatal lokuji and his son is ridiculed by his English-spouting classmates. This case holds the potential to give Hathiram a ticket to dharti lok with the occasional peek into swarg look. So what is the case?
Prime-time hero Sanjeev Mehra survives an assassination attempt. Inspector Hathiram begins the investigation that takes him to the darkest corridors of paatal lok. His leads are these four people whom he has caught. One girl, three guys.
Or are they. Within the nine episodes of Paatal Lok, we visit all these three worlds. Only to realize that swarg is not all that great and the residents are not just creepy crawlies.
The three worlds overlap, spillover, and percolate into each other and tell you that all that glitters is not gold after all. In these nine episodes, the directors of Paatal Lok Avinash Arun Dhawre and Prosit Roy (Pari) and writer Sudip Sharma (NH10, Udta Punjab) take you through everything that India 2020 is dealing with.
Well, everything minus the coronavirus because, well, the series was shot before this virus hit. But that apart, the politics of the country is interwoven into the narrative so deftly that not for one moment do you feel glutted.
There is a bloodthirsty saffron mob that kills a Muslim boy, but it is not pushed into your face. There are digs taken at the series's only 'minority' lead character as an off-hand remark, an objectionable word, or how people from 'his community' are increasingly getting into the Services these days. The idea of India as a secular country is torn apart, yes, but it is a neat cut. A jhatka and not halaal, if you will.
From the plight of journalism to the netherworld of hinterland politics, from fancy bungalows in Lutyens' Delhi with anxiety patients within them to the lanes of Chitrakoot where upper-caste politicians visit Dalit homes with mineral water bottles and cooked food, Paatal Lok covers quite a bit of our life today.
The incidents all through the series have all happened somewhere or other in this massive country of ours. Your mind will go back to headlines that dealt with mob lynching due to suspected cow meat which later turned out to be something else, you will recall how news is 'manufactured' to sound more palatable, and your mind will also go back to the BJP minister who broke bread with Dalit men and women in a Dalit home, only to later be outed as false. But where Paatal Lok wins over its contemporaries is the way these events are handled.
The characters in the series, for one, are picked out of your neighborhood. If your life is in swarg lok, you will find a known in Neeraj Kabi and Swastika Mukherjee. If you are a resident of dharti lok, Gul Panag and Jaideep Ahlawat's middle-class home, their tussles with their teenage son and the brother-in-law will appear familiar.
In paatal lok, you have the dreaded murderer Vishal Tyagi (a fantastic Abhishek Banerjee we will come to in some time) who doesn't bat an eyelid while sled-hammering a prey to death. Each of these characters is given a backstory. None of it looks forced into the runtime of the series. The crisp editing makes you hang on to every scene in the series, with each episode ending on a cliffhanger that compels you to click on the next. The beauty of the series also lies in the performance of each of the actors.
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