Amitabh Bachchan in 'Yudh' acts like a french bearded Mother Teresa

Last night, the biggest serial to hit Indian television in recent times, Yudh, aired its first episode. It’s the biggest because it marks Amitabh Bachchan’s debut in fiction television. If you ask me, this is a great move for Indian television. It’s almost on par with Kevin Spacey acting in House Of Cards. These are A-list movie stars who are willing to cross over to television. Only good things can come of it, right? Wrong. Yudh will be shown every night from Monday to Thursday, from 10:30 pm. Which means I can finish watching The Good Wife – an excellently scripted show – and then settle down to watching Big B on the small screen. However, this comes with a disadvantage. It’s got to be as interesting, if not more, than The Good Wife and if it’s a boring show, I might just nod off to sleep. Why is Yudh being shown so late at night? Perhaps it’s because the show, “created” by Anurag Kashyap, is filled with lots of violence, sex, drugs and abusive language? As it turns out, no. There’s vice and vendetta, sure, but it’s all presented in a way that’s so sanitised and squeaky-clean that you may find yourself wondering whether the show is sponsored by Harpic. (It isn’t.) So much so that by the end of the first episode, I was desperately hoping that some masala would be thrown into Yudh’s mix. [caption id=“attachment_1619609” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Amitabh Bachchan in Yudh. IBN Live.[/caption] A lot of us have high hopes for Yudh. It’s got a stellar cast, including Sarika, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Kay Kay Menon. The show’s creative directors are Kashyap and Shoojit Sircar. Kashyap’s had his moments – leaving aside him being the talk of Twitter last week, thanks to his self-proclaimed affinity for being an anti-feminist – and so has Sircar. On paper, there was no reason to be disappointed by Yudh. But disappointed I was. The first episode was by far one of the most uninspiring and unimpressive premieres I’ve seen. The amount of time it took me to try and figure out who’s who and what is happening reminded me a little of how I felt while watching Kashyap’s No Smoking. The show begins with Yudhisthir Sikarwar (Amitabh Bachchan) waking up in his house. He gets out of his bed and stares at his feet for a while. He has a wife, Nayantara, (Ayesha Raza) who looks like all good business family bahus: well-fed and sulky. Yudhishthir, aka Yudh, is a construction tycoon. He has two aides – Anand Upadhyay (Zakir Hussain), who never cracks a smile, and his PR person Mona (Mona Vasu), who (judging from how pale she looks in Yudh) knows neither joy nor a good make-up artist. Kay Kay Menon appears to be a corrupt police commissioner, in a neck brace. And Tigmanshu Dhulia is a corrupt politician. Menon and Dhulia steal the show in the five mintues that they have on camera. Dhulia is made to look like a sleazy politician, complete with Karunanidhi sunglasses, but by and large, these two manage to make sure things don’t become too obvious. You’ve got to watch and listen to them closely to out to figure out they’re Yudh’s enemies. Yudh also has a son, Rishi (Pavail Gulati), who plays video games on his phone while at the dinner table, thus establishing himself as useless. Fortunately for Yudh, this son is not the only fruit of Yudh’s loins. When a young woman named Taruni (Aahana Kumar) in a simple salwar kameez comes to meet him at work, we realise that Yudh’s family tree has complicated branches. Yudh and the young woman have a disjointed conversation that tells us the following: 1. Yudh is seriously unwell. 2. Taruni isn’t a particularly perceptive doctor because, she buys Yudh’s dismissive “I’m fine” even though he looks like he’s having a heart attack while talking to her. 3. Taruni is Yudh’s daughter and not too many people know about her. Taruni’s mother is Yudh’s first wife, which means we’ll get to see Sarika as that character in episode two. Then, once Taruni is gone, Yudh’s left arm stops working. Two other doctors come in and give him an “adrenaline injection”. They leave him “anxiety pills” and when Yudh asks how long he’s got to live, they say it’s between three and five years. Bachchan looks intense, as if he’s wondering whether this could possibly be a worse role than the one he had in Jhoom Barabar Jhoom. Meanwhile, Yudh’s brother-in-law turns out to be a jailbird. When Nayantara calls Yudh to ask him if he’ll come home early for the family reunion, Yudh makes unconvincing excuses. She looks and sounds grumpy. He hangs up. I yawn. Rishi goes to pick up the jailbird mamu, who wastes no time to establish himself as a good-for-nothing rascal. He goes to some random place known only as “HOTEL”, claims to own the place and gets beaten up by the chaps who run the place. Rishi calls Anand who makes a few calls and saves the day. When Anand meets Yudh later, he doesn’t spill the beans but he does clue Yudh in on the brother in-law not being a good influence on young Rishi. Bachchan looks intense again. Like he can smell a fart, but he is the only one in the room. Somewhere in the middle of all this are a flyover that’s about to crumble, a bearded hothead who is itching to crush Yudh underfoot, a news channel named News Now that appears to be the love child of News X and Times Now, and a mysterious and literally shadowy chap who pops out of nowhere to warn Yudh that the hospital where Taruni works could fall to the ground at any moment. What does Yudh do? He makes sure the hospital is evacuated even though it looks like a pretty solid structure. Oh and every now and then, after his adrenaline shot, Yudh sees a dwarf dressed as a clown. This was when I thought that the show must have put me to sleep and I was dreaming. But no, there he was, a dwarf in a clown outfit and a painted face. Not once, not twice, but four times. This raised my hopes that John Abraham would also appear and tell us not to smoke. It wouldn’t make much sense, but then so little has in Yudh so far and considering how dreary the show is at the moment, I’m open to Abraham adding a little masala by being an item number. What does all this mean? I don’t know. Perhaps Kashyap will write another 2000 word blog post titled The Symbolism of the Dwarf Clown in Indian Fiction Television. My only takeaway from the first episode is being married to Yudh is good reason to start gorging on food and being grumpy. This man has no sense of happiness or way with words. He’s seemingly a good and humane person. He doesn’t care about money. The reason he became a construction magnate is because as a young structural engineer he was disillusioned by corruption. Now he continues to be a construction magnate because there are 10,000 people in his employ, depending upon him for their livelihood. This man is Mother Teresa in a suit, a French beard and a wig whose every strand remains unmoving even when the wearer is running. Each episode of Yudh supposedly costs Rs 3 crore. If that is the case, it’s even more disappointing. The show’s cinematography and effects looks the same as any other show we’ve seen. In fact, shows like Saans, which were made 15 years ago, were better shot, made more intelligent use of their locations and had far more interesting characters. In an effort to make more money out of sponsors and perhaps because the channel figured they need to do something, anything, to make Yudh seem engaging, before each commercial break, you get something called “Yudh Moments”. These are scintillating anecdotes about the programme and the wonder that is Amitabh Bachchan. We are informed that he ad libbed his lines on the show and incorporated the flies on the set into his dialogue. Also, in a scene where he’s looking at his iPad, Bachchan was actually playing a game while delivering his lines. (When you see the scene, you can see him playing the game though. So I missed the point of this anecdote.) I expect in the next Yudh Moment, we will be told Bachchan turned water into milk and honey. Because that’s what happens when a massive cinema legend is squished into the small screen. Simply put, there’s way too much Amitabh Bachchan in this one hour. He’s on this show. When the commercials begin, he’s in the promos telling us to take part in Kaun Banega Crorepati. He’s probably in a few of the ads too. By the end of the hour, I’m starting to see dwarves dressed as clowns. But hey, I’ll be tuning in every day, in the hope that Yudh will surprise me as the series unfolds and that Kashyap and Sircar are simply clowning around with their massive budget and mega star cast. Yudh is telecast from Monday to Thursday at 10.30pm on Sony. Disclaimer: Firstpost is a part of Network18 which owns TV channels that compete with Sony.