Would someone involve the whole world while telling something to a person they can literally walk up to and talk with? No. Well, this is why I am writing this open letter. In fact, this is a cry for help. A cry for help to Ekta Kapoor. The reason I chose to write an open letter to her is that I have no other means to get in touch with her. And I know she has a PR team that reads everything that she’s been tagged in. I know this because my reviews of her content have been liked by Ekta Kapoor’s Twitter account. I am not naive to think that Ekta’s sitting there liking my reviews, but we all know how this works. However, I digress. My open letter to Ekta is about the absolute filth that her last two web series, ‘Zabaan Sambhal Ke’, and the recently previewed ‘Baby Come Na’ are full of.
Now, Ekta is known for her adult entertainment, the slapstick, triple innuendo-laden dialogues in her films. I don’t know who watches those films, but if they are making money, good for her. But I fail to understand why she greenlit these two monstrosities – Zabaan Sambhal Ke and Baby Come Na as web series. I also fail to understand how the makers of the original Zabaan Sambhal Ke agreed to give the name of their super successful series to ALTBalaji.
The dialogues, the script and the screenplay of both these series are laden with triple innuendo, sexually suggestive sequences and trivialise issues like child marriage. What series pokes fun at child marriages in their second episode? The same series that thinks it is hot to have two saree clad women – you know, those TV sarees – try to clothe themselves back in the presence of lecherous men. I am still wrapping my head around how the dialogue writers created that monstrosity of a dialogue. Every third dialogue in both these web series is a double entendre. Ekta, we are guys. Even if we want to, we can’t inject double entendre in every other dialogue!
The women in both these web series are depicted as complete blockheads who are accustomed to sexual harassment. For a production house that has just sacked a director for exactly that, it doesn’t look good, does it? In a scene in one of these series, a woman literally walks into a room and doesn’t notice that her ‘souten’ is in that room. That’s because she’s scrolling on her phone. That, my friends, forms a good two minute of the screenplay.
What kind of mentality allows this to happen? Is there nobody to tell Ekta what comes on screen? People might also ask why I am only targeting Ekta. Because take it from me, it’s true. Everything that happens or doesn’t happen in Balaji and ALTBalaji does with the succinct Ekta nod. I have spoken to some of the actors from the Balaji clan, and none of them refers to her as anything but Ekta Ma’am. During my course of interactions, I think only Rajeev Khandelwal and Kay Kay Menon have not referred to her in person, but have spoken about the production house in general – and I think, Habib Faisal too did the same.
Ekta, you have the art of making good films in you. You gave the world films like ‘Shor in the City’ and ‘Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai’, ‘Udta Punjab’, ‘Lootera’, when nobody was ready to. Don’t wrap this up with a ‘pehle mein chawal doonga, phir mein daal doonga’.