Aspirants Season 2 Review: Despite being preachy keeps you engaged with real-life characters

Aspirants grabs your attention with its popularity. This time, its canvas is expanded and more complex. Perhaps because lakhs of IAS preparing competitors can relate to the busy tea shops, coaching centers, and rental apartments with a backdoor entry. It presents a nostalgic version of the reality of preparing for the IAS exam, the world’s most competitive entrance exam for any job. Lakhs compete for just about a thousand spots to be the ’laal batti’ carrying civil servant that embodies power in our towns and cities. Dig a little deeper, and the show’s storyline doesn’t attempt to delve deeper into the psyche of these aspirants, who risk the prime of their work lives to make it through the three stages of the IAS exam. It works through a parallel narrative structure to highlight a social comment - a good IAS candidate might not always make for an effective administrator in real life. Season 2 picks up from where the first season left off. Abhilash (Naveen Kasturia) has come back to Rajendra Nagar to give his fifth attempt a serious try. This time, he keeps his distance from his friends Guri (Shivankit Singh Parihar) and SK (Abhilash Thapliyal). All three prepare for another round of IAS exams, but Abhilash has a new friend now, Deepa (Tengam Celine) from Arunachal Pradesh. Six years on, their dynamic is defined by memories of IAS prep. Abhilash is a district magistrate in Uttar Pradesh, Guri has become a Delhi-based businessman, married to Dhairya (Namita Dubey), Abhilash’s ex-girlfriend; and SK is a professor at a coaching institute. Their senior and mentor, Sandeep Bhaiya (Sunny Hinduja) is now an Assistant Labour Commissioner (ALC). He has to report to Abhilash. Aspirants carries a subconscious preachy spirit - of doing good for one’s country, and people - without engaging in the nuances of why one sets out to become an aspirant in the first place. So many bright young men and women spend years competing for an imbalanced, unhealthy competitive exam. Social conditioning, familial aspiration, parental ambition, a quest for power, job security, and status - more often than not, these drive IAS aspirants. Their desire to serve the nation and people is not always evident. Neither does this series look at the complexities of friendships that evolve in such a competitive atmosphere. For instance, despite Abhilash being a buddy of theirs, both SK and Guri hesitate to approach him for a minor favour. His behaviour further stokes their reluctance, without focusing on the steady change in Abhilash after he succeeds by clearing the UPSC. Naveen Kasturia has succeeded in making Abhilash a convincing IAS officer as the newly minted DM of Rampur. Be it his conversations, observations, or responses to genuine socio-political issues on the ground, he verges on being holier than thou and hard-focused on achieving targets rather than being an empathetic administrator. He plays the character with subtle body language touches like a suppressed smile and a touch of repressed arrogance. Abhilash is not likable nor is he inspiring, despite his journey coming across as genuine. In this aspect, its subtext underlines a true-to-life aspect of our civil servants. Sometimes they come across as sonorous and boring, despite their immense staying power and capacity to survive the pressures of the IAS. It also draws an interesting contrast in Abhilash’s inadequacies in grasping human problems of the marginalized people in his district to the sympathetic nature of Sandeep Bhaiya. Hierarchy might put him below Abhilash, but his efforts to help the needy and vulnerable make him come across as the real hero here. The women here are almost too good to be true. Dhairya is ready to take a backseat for her husband, Guri.  In turn he feels guilt and oscillates between different emotions without doing much about it. She seems to have a career but never actually seems to be doing much. Deepa is vulnerable initially but then fortifies into a woman of strength straight out of a brochure. Like the zero political or socio-economic conversations between the aspirants, these aspects of the show are too neutral to be appealing. Each one is working on becoming an IAS officer, but why do they want it so much? That’s anyone’s guess. This show does well on one crucial bit. A competitive exam brings out great learners but it doesn’t build character or offer good administrators. For that, one must look deeper and go beyond scores. Given its subject matter is so easy to view, it will grow on audiences and stay in water cooler conversations for some time to come. Rating: 3 out of 5 Aspirant Season 2 is showing on Amazon Prime Video

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