The series The Raikar Case on Voot opens up with the alleged suicide of Tarun Naik Raikar (Honey Kamboj), the youngest of the Raikar clan. While the suspect could be from a wide spectrum of people, the inquiry begins with the closest of all – the family. This suicide turns into a murder mystery and the rest is what you need to watch.
The suspense seems to be tight, and so are the roles played by the learned cast, be it Atul Kulkarni as Yashwant Naik Raikar, Ashvini Bhave as Sakshi Naik Raikar, Parul Gulati as Etasha Naik Raikar, Kunal Karan Kapoor as Mohit Naik Raikar or Neil Bhoopalam as John Pereira. Each of them seem suited for the roles they’re playing. But, while the thrill, chill and the suspense remain intact, there is a chain of thoughts that worked along the way for me.
I wonder if that’s what happens to be with every family in reality. Does every family happen to be unhappy and yet just hide it from the world out there? Because at least that’s what I’ve noticed in India, the idea of portraying a certain image of a family that isn’t even true in the first place.
The brother might not like the other brother or his ideology, but he’ll still pull it together for the world out there, pretending to be the happiest one amidst all of this. This isn’t something I can pull out statistics for, because there has been no recorded judgement of dysfunctionality in the Indian families because we are afraid to speak what we think and maybe, it’s something that has developed over the years only to satisfy the need to be socially accepted.
Maybe, ‘dysfunctional’ is a terminology that I might have pulled out of my over-thinking cap, but how do we really give credibility to our thoughts? An individual’s perception, habits or attitude have always seemed to affect another person. But in the Indian aspect of social order, the young are never supposed to pinpoint the elders; the elders are never to limit the young or walk out of their boundaries in an attempt to invade privacy (though I wonder if it exists); and neither does the gender disparity end at any given point.
The females are never to express their opinion, the males continue to make decisions for everyone, and people are looked at with suspicious eyes if seen together with someone from the opposite sex, no matter what relationship they might be sharing with them.
The idea of expression is what lacks in the Indian social order, specifically amongst families. And that’s what lingers in the corners of this series too – the lack of expression of one family member with another. So, I wonder if dysfunctional is even an extreme term to use here.
I might not have all the facts, but I do hold an opinion, and if you believe it’s challengeable, watch out for this series on voot.com, and let’s change the idea of families for each other.
On the whole, this series will make your quarantine worthwhile. Hence, watch out for this directorial bliss by Aditya Sarpotdar.