Just before Holi, when the issue of the web series ‘college romance’ came up before the Delhi High Court, Justice Swarna Kanta Sharma tried to watch the series in her chamber. He had to put earphones in his ears. The court said “Someone’s personal choice which is not the choice of the majority in the country cannot be telecasted as the choice of the majority on the ground or presumption that today’s youth use similar obscene and depraved language”. Not even a week has passed for this comment of the court and recently a web series ‘Rana Naidu’ has started telecasting on the OTT of CEO Ted Sarendos, who returned to America after meeting all the big leaders and ministers of the country, which you can not even watch in bedroom without using earphones. This is also a very cheap version of the web series ‘Sacred Games’ which aired on this OTT.
Venkatesh Daggubati and Rana Daggubati are in uncle-nephew relationship. We thought both would do something good together. But Netflix gave both of them the Indian remake of the American web series ‘Ray Donovan’ and both of them spoiled their years of image with just one series. What ‘Sacred Games’ did to Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s brand image, he is facing the consequences on the big screen till date. After ‘Rana Naidu’, there is a doubt whether the audience of Hindi speaking or any Indian language will go to watch any film of Rana Daggubati with the family. In the folk culture on which ‘Ray Donovan’ is based, a father is allowed to brought another women in front his wife who is dying of cancer and in front of his children! There will be a trend of abusing your father! There would be a culture of abusing even your elder brother, but in India? Right now water is flowing in Ganga, Jamuna, Krishna and Kaveri, and as long as these are there, it is difficult for such stories to be recognized as mass entertainment.
The story of ‘Rana Naidu’ is the same as that of ‘Ray Donovan’. There is a tall man who washes away the sins of famous personalities. The elder brother is a stunt master but his hands keep trembling. The younger brother was sexually abused by a baba in his childhood and since then he is living in trauma. As soon as he arrives, he demands compensation for the sexual abuse of his son. Baba also gets ready to give five crores. Then the father drops the bombshell that all three have one more brother who was born to his mistress. There are attempts to blackmail the cricketer through his semen. A dirty story of a hero from the South having a gay relationship. And there is the wife of a master cleaner who is immersed in the world of crime, whose two children are grown up and who has never tried to know what is the past, present and future of their father?
In this series made by a company named Locomotive Global, the story, characters, their background, their characterization, their dialogues, all have been directly copied. Even the bird named Original is not visible. Even then the character of Rana Daggubati is busy in saving his reputation, but Venkatesh, who once enthralled the Hindi audience by acting in the song ‘Phoolon Sa Chehra Tera Kaliyon Si Muskaan’, would not believe that he will play such a role even in his old age.Surveen Chawla has become a mother of two grown children and tries her best to capture the new age mother’s place completely, if not in films, at least in the series. Abhishek Banerjee gets characters like Jaffa because of the permanent expressions on his face, this is also decided by this series. Yes, Sushant Singh has once again proved that if he gets the right character, he still has the guts to deliver.
