A scene from ‘Class’, adapted by Ashim Ahluwalia from the Spanish series ‘Elite’.
is the latest ott sizzler Class from netflix – A heady cocktail of hot youngsters, hot sex and hot-button social issues.
It’s a pretty believable remake of the hit Spanish series Aristocrat class, And this is where the stumbling block sometimes occurs. At one point, the rich teenager drives her poor boyfriend home at night after a party. Her brother smuggles her along with his female classmate for an after-midnight swim in the pool.
Surprisingly, no one sees them. The house is luxurious but there seems to be hardly any staff. That’s the problem with remakes, said my friend who loves all kinds of OTT series. In Spain, it is believable that even the wealthy have some full-time employees. one in Delhi Such house will have 24×7 security guards. Somebody must have woken up to open the front door. He must have stepped on some people sleeping in the living room. Later the lover tries to break into the safe leaving the girl sleeping on the bed. He wanders from room to room and yet never meets a soul.
I remember a friend who went into a very wealthy business family Kolkata, She said there was one person whose only job seemed to be answering the landline. ‘Landline’s answer- Wallah‘ über became our code word for privilege. It’s a detail that I would never have dreamed of as a writer if I hadn’t heard about it firsthand.
The basic problem is that we have a much easier time writing realistic descriptions of the lives of the poor and lower middle class. They are already the subject of academic study and award-winning non-fiction books. Plus, they have fewer options when it comes to being put under a sociological microscope. But the ultra-rich have no incentive to tell us how many layers of protection cover their daily existence. They live on a world so far away from most of us that we can’t even imagine life on the Moon.
A scene from ‘Class’.
so we come up with caricatures like Class Where a school going teenager is suddenly appointed as a director in his father’s company. A friend from Delhi turns a blind eye saying that even the most dashing businessmen are sent abroad to get some kind of MBA stamp first. The Botox-ed mom just drinks cocktails from the moment she wakes up because that’s what we imagine the rich and bummed do all day. When the school boy comes to his friend’s house in the morning, that too on a school day, he is offered a whiskey the way other families might offer Coca-Cola.
As the Indian markets opened up, the outlook on wealth changed. This is not something to be kept under khaki wraps anymore. It’s okay to express it. But most of us get a glimpse of that rarefied world of wealth only when a big, very fat Indian wedding takes place in the house of a big industrialist.
A wedding planner once told me about a wedding held at Falaknuma Palace, where the mandap was made of 80,000 roses and every tenth rose was studded with a Swarovski crystal pin. The entire event was captured with 15 cameras and then shown at a movie theater for family and friends afterwards. But that’s just special occasion bling. Class Considered to be about the daily lives of the very rich. That’s where our imagination fails us.
The British historical drama series Downton Abbey (2010–2015) depicts an early 20th-century aristocratic family living with servants at a country estate.
In the episode where the poor student visits the rich girl’s house, he asks in astonishment if only four people live in the huge mansion. She says yes. It would have been the perfect moment to show an army of maids and cooks and security guards running around the house, employees who live there and yet are never counted among the residents. But nothing like this happens. it’s not robert altman gosford parka murder mystery set in the upstairs world of masters and servants, or Downton Abbey, The employees keep running these mansions, but here even the employees come in the way of the plot.
Despite all this, Class Have a fun binge. The performances are good. The cast is eye candy – clearly there are no overweight rich people in this corner of Delhi. The story of the whodunnit is intriguing. It ticks off a lot of issues, many of them relatable to the Indian context: Hindu-Muslim relations, the hijab, homosexuality, caste, class, Kashmir, toxic social media, drugs, teen pregnancy, police brutality.
But Class Shows that when it comes to portraying crazy rich Indians, Houston, we have a problem.
The author is the author of ‘Don’t Let Him Know’ and loves to let everyone know about his opinion whether asked or not.