Last fortnight I saw two shows. Each show is about a terror attack that shook a city to the core, it’s aftershocks rippling through the world. Each show is about the people who saw what happened first hand. The only difference- one show is part fiction, one is a documentary series.
Mumbai Diaries 26/11 fictionalises the terror attacks that shook Mumbai and the country up. With a ensemble cast at his disposal, Nikhil Advani, delivers a show that is technically sound but emotionally just all over the place. In 13 years, most Mumbaikars remember these attacks and the anxiety it caused them. I’m no different. The footage of the Taj Mahal Palace or the Marine Lines shoot out made me pause the series and gasp for air. However, the ill-defined characters, unnecessary, perhaps forced cussing, unreasonable melodrama dilutes out what could have been a gripping, gritty show. In the middle of heavy gunfire, a doctor delivers a textbook preach about mental health. It makes you cringe! To put it in a nutshell, the show starts of as a desi Greys Anatomy and turns into a desi Homeland of sorts. Geddit?
Pic: IMDB
Then I watched The Turning Point on Netflix — a 5-part docuseries that covers the 9/11 attacks and the effect they had on people, individuals and their lives, and on a larger level, on the world. The series goes into the history of Afghanistan, the events that lead up to the attacks on the World Trade Center, the war on terror that followed, with American troops entering Iraq in search of WMD or Afghanistan to destroy Al Qaeda and the consequent exit of the American forces from Afghanistan. These events of the last 20 years are fresh on one’s mind. And watching them unfold in a saturated 5 episodes feels overwhelming. But it’s an objective reminder of miscalculated moves, bravery, loss and the failure to see other human beings as humans before anything else.
If the first 20 years of this decade were plagued by the war on terror, the next couple of years could possibly be about being terrorised by a virus smaller than a dust particle. These two series are a reminder of the ways in which human values have survived and emerged stronger in the face of absolute terror and devastation. Something to think about.