Curious Case: By Radhika Bhirani

Radhika Bhirani for Zenger News --rbhirani@gmail.com Of the 40-plus titles that global video streaming giant Netflix has announced for its grand 2021 line-up in India, as many as nine are new seasons of existing shows. It may be common in the United States, but for India, the number is representative of the content creation, production, and consumption revolution sparked by the emergence and proliferation of the streaming world. Avid Indian watchers of American and British content are aware of and accustomed to the season format where a set of new episodes of a show are launched at intervals. Shows like “The Simpsons”, “Friends”, “The Sopranos”, “24”, “Modern Family”, “House of Cards”, “The Crown”, and “Game of Thrones” to name a few, in fact, have a huge fan following. There was a phase, especially post 2010, when Indian television experimented with season-based series in the fiction space. “Few and far attempts were made, but the TV was never really a comfortable environment for the ...

Radhika Bhirani ~~ rbhirani@gmail.com ~~ The kitchen was buzzing. Piping hot and fresh tandoori paranthas were coming off the tawa. Vegetable bowls were being refilled or reheated, until everyone had eaten. Correction: Until everyone else had eaten. As we -- my mother-in-law and I -- then sat down for lunch, a gracious guest asked, "Ek baat bataaiye... Itna kaam karke kitchen mein, kya apne aap banaaya hua khaana khud enjoy karte ho?" Our response came in unison, and in a jiffy: "Nahin". It's a sad, but mostly universal reality, he then commented, raising a concern about the monotony of women's domestic drudgery -- one that is being pleasantly raised as a wake-up call of insidious sexism in the kitchen and within the precincts of a house, by a gamut of film and web content in India in recent times. From "rasoda" politics on Indian television, we've moved to the politics of gender bias surrounding home and kitchen. In telling the story of a newl...