When it came to the TV remote in our house, the line of hierarchy was set in stone. Weekends were for my dad and his obsession with obscure documentaries about an elephant leading her heard through the African savanna and watching Dhoni hit a six during IPL. If you think that me and my brother could at least spend the weekdays after school watching nobita get bullied by Suneo and Gyaan (which honestly deserved- that creep was watching Shizuka bath), well you thought wrong. Enter my mother with all her TV serials which start at 5 p.m in the evening and ends well after we've gone to bed at 10 p.m. Ask me today, I would say Indian serials are the bottom of the barrel entertainment, where logic is optional, actors overact with a dramatic 'domta domta dherena' playing in the background, where in every family there is that one bitch who gets up to crazy shenanigans and just can't let the female lead live in peace. One moment, the lead character is happily married, and the next, they find out they have a twin sibling who is out to kill her, and she has married her stepbrother or some shit. However, when I was in school, my intellectual capabilities and neural circuitry were overridden and highjacked by the hotness of Barun Sobti aka, Arnav Singh Raizada, who set the standard for the man I planned to marry in future. Along with Kushi Kumari Gupta, the lead actress, they were the perfect love story, and I swore to myself, If I didn't have a love story like them, I would rather die alone.
Now as a fully grown adult with a mature, developed prefrontal cortex, I happened across some of the clips of the serial on YouTube, and decided to rewatch some of the it. As I write this post today, I'm confused. This cannot be the same serial with which my mother blackmailed me into completing my trigonometry homework. This was not the show I loved and eagerly waited all day to watch. Arnav Singh Raizada I remembered was a hot, brooding, smirking, intense, coconut on the outside-marshmallow on the inside kinda man. However, the reality I had to reconcile with as I watched the clips one after another was that Arnav Singh Raizada was an arrogant, emotionally constipated man who pretty much harassed Kushi into falling in love with him. This guy locks her in a dark room, physically intimidates her, accuses her of being a gold digger, rips of the tie on the back of her blouse for absolutely no reason and this is just their first meeting. He spends half the serial misunderstanding something or the other about Kushi, starting an argument, screaming at the poor girl even as she tries to explain the situation to him and then finding out later that he was an absolute dumbass with poor listening skills and had the emotional depth of a robot, coming to the realization at the end that -'Oh it was a misunderstanding and Kushi was innocent-this means I like her, but no I can't like her because I'm a manchild with no self-awareness,', and then proceeds to have an emotional breakdown and rinse and repeat over 200 episodes. My man, you need therapy, not love. On the other hand, Kushi Kumari Gupta, is a beautiful woman but also incredibly dumb and highly slow on the uptake. Like girl, if he's grabbing you so hard that you have to hide the imprint of his hands by covering yourself with a dupatta, best believe his red flags are brighter than the red marks he left on you. It takes delusion on another level to come to the conclusion that this guy who spends half of his time treating you like you're beneath him and the other half taunting you about your low social status to satisfy his own ego, secretly loves you. Kids don't fall for this kinda bullshit; these are the kind of guys who get booked under POSH for sexual harassment.
The best character in this serial is also ironically the one I hated when I was young, because I thought she was keeping Kushi and Arnav apart. Arnav's girlfriend (who becomes his ex-girlfriend)- Lavanya. She's gorgeous, intelligent, has a career and a fashion sense Kushi could only dream of, but because this is India and we are filled top to bottom with 'sanskar', a women's worth here is only determined by how good the pakora she makes are and how much willing she is to lose her personality and her independence to fit into her Huband's family. Lavanya has been Arnav's girlfriend for a while now and just like any sane, normal women she wants to marry her boyfriend. This makes sense right. Now instead of sitting this girl down and telling her he doesn't want to marry her like a man, we watch about 50 episodes Arnav being a little ass bitch and his family trying to make her sanskari, because if you wear miniskirts instead of sarees, of course you are a characterless girl unworthy of marrying your boyfriend of 5 years. I'm not even kidding; his family actually enlists Kushi to teach her 'sanskar'. And if you're wondering how the fuck does one teaches 'sanskar' and what does that even entail, watch Kushi spending all day instructing this foreign educated career women who works shoulder to shoulder with Arnav in the office, make jelabis in the kitchen in the morning and labor for the 100 different pujas this family does in the evening. The whoop I let out when this woman breaks up with Arnav, I swear to God. She chooses her dignity and self-respect before a man and girl--RESPECT.
While the serial had its faults, one thing was undeniable-the romantic chemistry between the leads. Hot, Intense, electric. Both the actors basically hardcarried this show on their backs and damn do they look good together. The writing of the show and the banter between the leads are hilarious to watch even today. And I'll always feel nostalgic about the OST of Rabba Ve in the background and they gazed intensely into each other's eyes. They created the perfect fantasy for me to escape into as a child and I will always look back fondly on Arnav's popular dialogue - 'What the'. While I would never fall in love with Arnav in real life, the only thing I wish and pray for from God is for my future significant other to have at least 10 percent of the hotness of Arnav Singh Raizada. Pleeseeeeeeeeeeeeeee
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