Abhimanyu the wobbly doll (and a plug for Anti-Serious)

A shout-out for the new online magazine Anti Serious (Laughter in Slow Motion), launched by Sumana Roy, Manjiri Indurkar, Tanushree Bhasin and Debojit Dutta. You can read their mission statements here and surf the various sections. And here is a piece I wrote for them about the tonal peculiarities of some scenes in the Star Plus Mahabharata (centred on the so-tragic-it-was-funny killing of Abhimanyu). The piece was written back when the show was still on, so content-wise it may seem a bit dated - but hopefully the basic point comes across.

Attacked from various directions (by a bunch of people who look more like clumsy sidekicks than seasoned warriors), Abhimanyu continues to smile, like the college fresher who is undergoing a spell of mild ragging and knows he will come out of it having influenced people and won new (grown-up) friends [...] And perhaps here, the writers unintentionally tapped into something truthful about the Abhimanyu character that generations of teary-eyed Mahabharata readers have missed: that he is a swollen-headed – if insanely talented – 16-year-old boy with a highly romantic view of war, who doesn’t quite understand the implications of it all.

 [Full piece here]