Akhilesh Dandge

This show has left me in anguish, despair, hope, loneliness and a relentless magnitude of emotional turmoil, that is going to take ages for me to heal. Every line, every scene, every emotion cuts skin deep and makes you relive the life of the protagonist, as you sincerely long for his life to get better. It may open up unhealed wounds for some, and if God forbid, you may have lived the life of an LGBT individual, be ready for sleepless nights that the situations flashed in the show might punch your guts with! This show, in its innate sincerity have served one of the RAWEST and REALISTIC forms of representation of queer life. Every episode made me relive the adolescent joy of new found relationship, and at the end of the next episode left me in absolute emptiness as though it's narrating my own life ordeals. It's as RAW as it can get. The fear of losing hope, the feeling of uncertainties in every step of your adult life, losing friends, dealing with the harsh denial of parents, dating a strongly religious and closeted partner, and also the most taboo topics such as HIV, the show absolutely doesn't shy from any of it! In a world of heteronormative feminine centric BL dramas, that encash majorly on the looks and fetishes of its audience completely neglecting the negative repercussions it can have on an adolescent LGBT individual, where they are steered far from reality and make them set extremely unrealistic expectations from both relationship and family, only to pave the way for depression and disappointment in future, this show is a an extremely good and genuine steep that draws the necessary line between fiction and reality. Though I do certainly enjoy the optimism and ray of hope that some traditional BLs give, it sets extremely unattainable expectations which I feel does more harmful than good. The characters are GREY, and may not be reminiscent of your idealistic fictional protagonists. ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: Even though this show has been a major milestone in how it deals with queer media, I did have some reservations regarding it. The choice of choosing four different directors to direct the four phases of the protagonists life seems a good idea to display the drastic arrays of life, but unfortunately makes it suffer from an incoherent narrative. The hurdles and losses the protagonists encounters through the passage of every two episodes is devastating enough, but it fails to show what impact it has on his mind clearly. People and issues just bluntly come and go, even though that is the way of life, but the initial fervours have little implications on his life moving ahead. Plus even though with the progression of HIV treatment, little has been shown on the implications of it on his health, though that may not have been the motive of the author. Packing a decade of the protagonists story in 8 episodes was a bit too fast paced for the audience to actually feel the depth and sensitivity of the most of the issues presented, albeit some viewers like me who have been through the protagonists shoes to understand the gravity of the situations.