“Every person wastes his life trying to become someone. Competitions, IAS, Collector’s residence… he’s always becoming something. There’s nothing called life. The world is living. Life is to be lived, flavorfully. Don’t look at life as a bargain. Experience it and enjoy it.” That isn’t the introduction to Netflix’s Taj Mahal 1989, nor is it the philosophical canoe upon which it travels. It’s a line that Sudhakar Mishra (Danish Husain) tells his friend, Akhtar Baig (Neeraj Kabi), under the cover of semi-darkness. They recently bumped into each other at a poetry recitation after a decade or two, and, now, they can’t seem to let go of each other.
They studied together in college, where Sudhakar bagged a gold medal. However, over the course of time, he ended up becoming a tailor by following in his dad’s footsteps, and, the guy who buried his head in poetry, to earn brownie points from the woman he fell in love with, became a Philosophy professor. You never know how life is going to give you the short end of the stick and this is a great example to show you that the jobs that people take up need not necessarily be a measure of their intellectual capacity — academic or otherwise.
Taj Mahal 1989 zooms in on the lives of almost a dozen people from different age groups. While Sudhakar and Mumtaz (Sheeba Chaddha) live together without getting married since they don’t conform to society’s idea of a sacred union, Sarita (Geetanjali Kulkarni) and Akhtar are on the verge of a nervous breakdown — or midlife crisis — and they’re finding it hard to stay together. Well, at least Sarita is disappointed that her husband is more interested in sharpening his poetic knowledge than getting cozy with her. In a rather straightforward comedy-drama tone, while pouring her heart out, she tells her friend, “Intelligence and romance don’t go together.” Her grouse is that Akhtar makes her feel like a dimwit all the time.
Although I do understand her area of pain, I can’t fathom how their relationship survived for 22 years. She’s a Physics professor, so her forte is far removed from Akhtar’s. Perhaps, the time period this series is set in — the late 80s — is what made their marriage sail through. Again, the 80s setting is merely a rough piece of nostalgia that makes up the living rooms of the characters and not their conversations. The team that has worked on the production design gets the props right, but the costumes are way off the mark. Moreover, for a show set in Lucknow, it’s kind of blasphemous to not have scenes that take you through the chambers of the city.
Then, on the other side is a group of three friends — Rashmi (Anshul Chauhan), Dharam (Paras Priyadarshan), and Angad (Anud Singh Dhaka) — of which two are in a relationship. The tonal shift that makes Dharam pick up a gun to scare off a guy from getting too close to his girlfriend and then somehow getting involved in campus politics is flippantly written. Dharam seems to be a puppet for a right-wing political party and Angad, on the contrary, seems to side with the Communist party. But the questions of caste and religion never come into the picture ever.
By totally eliminating caste from the table, Pushpendra concentrates on the financial statuses alone. A rich Sikh student, aka a capitalist, mugs up lines penned by Angad to woo a woman who reads Marx. Likewise, the lower-middle class couple, Sudhakar and Mumtaz (a vegetable seller), is simply poorer than the teaching duo, Akhtar and Sarita. Maybe Pushpendra wanted to keep Taj Mahal 1989 free from the dark realities of an era gone by. But that’s not an excuse you can buy.
The series isn’t third-rate by any degree. It just feels plastic and insincere sometimes.