Mona Singh is the most versatile mom in our movies today. In Border 2, she was a fiery Punjabi mom. In Happy Patel, she was a mafia matriarch with a thing for cutlets. In Bads Of Bollywood, she was a mom with a naughty past.
In her new series Maa Ka Sum, Mona is a cool single mother with a cool 19-year-old son with a cool plan.
Coolness, as you might have guessed, is a goal that Nicholas Kharkongor’s lengthy series aspires to. It’s not a devious plan. But at times, the son, Agastya (Mihir Ahuja), plans to hook up his single mother, Vinnie, with the most mathematically accurate partner, only to get tediously housebroken.
Initially, I enjoyed the mother-son banter. There was a sincere sassiness, a one-for-the-road jauntiness, in the equation. Mona Singh is an actor who can bring to life the most weather-beaten plot. Mihir Ahuja, who plays her son, is passably competent. He needs to work on his energy level. Also, to play Agastya as a genius requires more than a gift of the gab. You need to be Shah Rukh Khan to carry off this threshold of cocky confidence.
At the start of the placid series, Agastya is shown talking a chap out of his suicide bid. The calculated mathematical moves follow the storyline out of its connectible reach. We are soon lost in the protagonist’s pursuit “to do the maths” with his mother’s love life.
Vinnie’s dating mishaps are amusing. But I am yet to figure out why Agastya objects to the man Abhimanyu (Ranveer Brar), whom his mother has the hots for. Could it be that subconsciously, Agastya doesn’t really want his mother to find a soulmate? Could he be actually wishing singlehood on her?
The sequence in which Agastya grills Abhimanyu is incredibly ill-conceived and self-defeating.
Psychological complexities are brushed aside for more sedate likelihoods. While his mother struggles to tell the meddlesome son to eff off, Agastya’s own love life is complicated on paper, confusing in execution.
The casual treatment of a faithful girlfriend, Annie (Celesti Bairagey), smacks of over-privilege and under-sensitivity. Even in Agastya’s growing fondness for an attractive teacher (played by the attractive Angira Dhar), there is more awe than feeling. Eventually inspite of a sense of freshness in the treatment Maa Ka Sum feels like straws wafting in the wind looking for a resting place.
