Aspirants 3 on Amazon MX Player is all about dreams and ambitions. However, as work representing the aspirational ambit, it’s not over-ambitious. It ambles across the lives of the familiar characters (who have nothing new to say or do) with the confidence of following footprints on the sand. Beyond that, there is little here that we haven’t seen before.
Navin Kasturtia’s Abhilash Sharma is still the sullen, unsmiling bureaucrat, while his friend SK (Abhilash Thapliyal) is still the ‘ever-grin’ buddy. There is an effectively executed buddy-reconciliation sequence in Episode 2 between the two.
By and large, though, the direction by Deepesh Sumitra Jagdish is uneven and at times repetitive. For example, there is an early dinner sequence with all the friends and their partners where they are down to their desserts, but no one is seen actually eating. These are not characters who would go on a crash diet.
The dialogues could also have been written with more care.
“No wonder why (sic.) you don’t have friends,” a female character interjects angrily, and she isn’t English-challenged, as many characters are.
The language divide is a huge issue in the series. There is plenty of teastall tattle on learning English in scrappy flashbacks where characters, only the men, shave off their moustache to look young. The aspirants from vernacular backgrounds are instructed to memorize words from a particular newspaper. I wonder if that newspaper gets free endorsement, or if this is a tie-up of sorts?
Amidst all the chaos and confusion of overweening ambitions, the third season of Aspirants makes a reasonably strong impact. At the core of the series is the proposal to construct an education town with old rivals Pavan (Jatin Goswami) and Abhilash squabbling like two entrepreneurs over a precious tender.
Jatin Goswami has an excellent meltdown monologue in the final episode, where he explains why Hindi-medium students need to be taught to respect English. It comes too late in the narrative.
There is a potentially engaging plot in here somewhere waiting to be claimed. The problem with Aspirants 3 is that there is no dearth of social commentary and bleeding hearts, but not enough emotional heft. The female characters, even the self-dependent cop Deepa (Tengam Celine), seem to be around only to support masculine motivations.
There is this self-consciously ‘cute’ moment in a hospital where Abhilash’s girlfriend (from Arunachal, tokenism in place) asks him to dance for her. And he does!!
The moment is dedicated to the man giving in to a woman’s whim to humour her when she is unwell. Most of the series’ playing time is devoted to humouring and prodding the hectic hemisphere of bureaucratic aspirations.
