Moving In With Malaika is surprisingly watchable
Moving In With Malaika is surprisingly watchable
Some women seem to have it all. And people don’t like that. It is the flip side of what-have-I-done-to-deserve-this traction.
What have THEY done to deserve this? Why must THEY have it all? The beauty, booty and the feast? And who looks like that after 40? Chal jhoothi!
Women, when they see Malaika Arora they suffer from happiness envy.
Admittedly she is as drop-dead gorgeous now as she was twenty years ago. Her show Moving In With Malaika, on Disney+Hotstar, an ongoing series which tries to capture her life, unplugged, is a tribute to the beau monde, the good life… no, make that the best life, the bed-of-roses type of life which most women (and men) only dream about.
Moving In With Malaika lets us glimpse the lovely lady’s life up close and personal. I must admit I thought she was only going to talk about herself. And she doesn’t disappoint. Malaika’s lifestyle is unabashedly self-centred. She is the heroine of her story, and why not? Some of the “problems” she talks about in the series, for instance, her automobile phobia after a road accident, would hardly appeal to my househelp whose son is in jail, and whose daughter has been dumped by her husband for a second marriage.
How to drive a car after an accident hardly qualifies as a problem for a woman who crashes into a pile of excreta every day. Moving In With Malaika is not meant for the women who watch Anupamaa every day religiously. Dammit, this is the other side of the kismet coin, and seen in the proper—what you see is what you will never get—perspective, it is spirited spunky and well-packaged.
I especially liked Episode 4 where Malaika tries stand-up comedy for the first time. Of course, the fact that the audience is composed of those close to her is a big help. This is nepotism of another kind. With encouragement from standup comic Sumukhi Suresh and her family and friends, Malaika goes up on stage and gives it back to the naysayers, or the trolls, as they are called, letting them know she is neither apologetic about the charmed life that she has,nor is she looking for approval from those who think she is too old, and too divorced, to be dating a younger man and letting her body do all the talking.
Speaking of her boyfriend Malaika says, “He is not bunking classes to date me.”
Cheers to that.
The series gets the privileged subject’s spirit of self-awareness right. Unlike the execrable Fabulous Lives Of Bollywood Wives, Moving In With Malaika is contemplative and reflective of an unapologetically charmed life. Strictly speaking, Malaika Arora is no more a Bollywood wife. She has moved on.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.
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