don’t know about you, but i am beginning to find kuch rang pyaar ke downright offensive. there are many things that don’t appeal but one thing is really getting to me. this crass divide between people who do and don’t eat meat is grotesque and sickening in tone. i am bengali and i eat fish, yeah. my own mami is a vegetarian from up, my mausa was a brahmin from up… never have i ever heard of such nonsense and disrespect on matters pertaining to food. yes, a bit of teasing of the vegetarians from my fam, and i’m sure some of the same from the other side. but this?

who is writing this and why?

all hindi shows go on and on about vegetarian food as if no one in india eats meat or fish. thankfully, a few are above this. here, you are trying to show the culture gap between a bengali kayastha family and a up brahmin one… fine… but don’t cross lines of decency. that way, you respect neither side. all that is happening is the so called superior vegetarian brahmin family is ending up looking ill mannered and uncivil. and their son… i really don’t understand how this is even vaguely acceptable to the young man.

i wonder if the writers know that many brahmins in india eat meat and fish. among them, the kashmiri brahmins, the bengali brahmins, and the gaud sarawat brahmins… i am sure many others do too. vegetarianism, says a vegetarian friend of mine, came to india much later after buddhism and jainism spread. and even if it came earlier, and many people adopted it of their choice, that still doesn’t give anyone the right to denigrate anyone else’s food.

also going by her surname, sonakshi bose belongs to a kulin kayastha family… um, people such as subhash chandra bose are from that community. i personally do not believe in the caste system, but wonder if anyone in the production unit knows about the nuances of caste, since they are constantly talking of brahmins, etc. and yes, one of my uncles married a brahmin lady back in 1966, we don’t remember any drama from her side during the wedding. she is one of my favourite aunts.

okay, let’s say, this family of up brahmin lineage has never even remotely contemplated the possibility of one of theirs falling in love with a meat eating non vegetarian girl and marrying her, bringing her home. great ground to play up drama… question is, what kind of drama and how.

a serial shouldn’t matter so much. many of them show pretty bizarre stuff and i say nothing. mainly because i don’t watch them. but this one comes around the same time as the only two shows i watch now and then. suddenly this whole fish thing started getting out of hand and progressively worse.

i am thinking, here we are in a country that has come about thanks to the uniting of several diverse people, cultures, and kingdoms (500 plus princely states at the time of independence) and we have tried our best to respect one another… even when we have ribbed each other a bit and tried to get our head around all this diversity. and we have got to a pretty good place.

it’s no mean feat.

they say, dosa is delhi’s favourite snack now. and i saw plenty of women in salwar kameez in rural kerala just a while back… means a lot. when the country became independent, different communities barely knew each other. there were no salwars in the south from what i understand. and that’s just the north south divide.

both the search for livelihood and yes, the overriding culture of tolerance we have has seen us through. also, and i must say this with a little salaam, hindi cinema, especially the popular kind. where veg non veg hindu christian muslim vegan jew sikh jain punjabi bengali tamil telegu gujarati bania kayastha brahmin uttarpradeshi bihari assamese, actually people from all communities got together and crossed barriers creating magic for a poor nation with burgeoning people and a dream to go to a better place. even if profit was the only motif of the makers, their product sewed us together, gaining popularity in corners no one believed it would or could. developing a language all its own that we all understood.

it’s not a perfect scenario but there’s much to be happy about and, after seeing many parts of the world, fairly proud of.

so.

i am sorry, i just don’t get this. it’s ugly. it’s divisive. and it’s frankly really bad drama. a colors’ serial had a bengali-marwari issue at a point but it was never allowed to go this out of hand… also it somehow fitted their story line. actually, there are cultural premises causing conflict in many serials, never seen one being this insensitive.

anyway. guess, i can just stop watching. but even so, i want to put on record, i find kuch rang pyaar ke aise bhi offensive and insulting.

 

indrani’s index

 

disclaimer: these are the personal views of the writer and an opinion piece.