‘Gullak’ season 4 review: Still one of the best Indian shows
Gullak without also speaking of Wagle Ki Duniya. Based on RK Laxman’s beloved ‘Common Man,’ the 1980 show directed by Kundan Shah starred Anjan Srivastava and Bharti Achrekar and painted a vivid picture of the average middle-class family as it stood 40 years ago. The ongoing SonyLiv show Gullak — created and directed by Shreyansh Pandey — is a worthy descendant, a slice-of-life series showing us that no matter how far the country may and may not have come in the last four decades, the great Indian middle-class grapples with the very same contradictions and insecurities.
That things have literally not changed becomes evident with the third episode of the new Gullak season, an episode all about that uniquely Indian struggle of parting with hoarded relics and bargaining with the kabaadi-wala, the waste-collector. He is doing us a service, taking away what we do not need, and yet we haggle aggressively to get paid for old newspapers. This is the exact storyline of the very first Wagle Ki Duniya episode, the kabaadi becoming a metaphor for our middle-class life.
Our reluctance to part with the old guarantees that we are forever struggling to make room for the new. “Most Indians of my generation were brought up on the slogans of patriotism and sacrifice," wrote Khushwant Singh in his 1999 novel The Company Of Women. “When we grew up, we realised that those who had coined these slogans did not believe in them.
We saw the hypocrisy of our leaders. We saw the corruption among them. Our middle class is caught in this trap.
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