Maa Ka Sum review: Maths nerd Agastya aka Gast (Mihir Ahuja) has his heart set upon seeing his single mom Vinita aka Vinnie (Mona Singh) ‘settled’, so he’s in search of that perfect algorithm that will lead to a perfect match. In all the adding and subtracting, he forgets that humans are still the sum of their gloriously imperfect parts. No artificial intelligence can crack ‘em. At least not yet, fingers tightly crossed.
Maa Ka Sum. Maa Kasam. Nice wordplay in the title: we see what you did there. The premise feels perky. The series is directed by Nicholas Kharkongar, who gave us the singularly delightful Axone (2019), and is helmed by the equally delightful Mona Singh, who’s rightfully the flavour of the season. So the hope that this will be more than the usual slop we get to see in terms of family drama, isn’t unreasonable.
The eight-part show is certainly better than many others that are being cranked out from streaming factories, but it is also true that it turns out to be a mixed bag, with the sparkly bits interspersed with those which are flat. The culprit, straight up, is the length: not all subjects need so much unpacking, because the padding risks losing our attention. The other : everything — from homes, to college classrooms to cafes — feels like a set. So things flatten: whatever happened to creating depth of field?
The high points are the exchanges between hardworking property agent mommy Vinita and loving beta Agastya, ranging from soft and tender to annoyed and furious, the kinds of emotions mothers and sons can feel when life gives them lemons but not the means to make that darn lemonade, put the trash out please. They do get into a repetitive loop — will do annoying thing, will be forgiven — but hey, that’s how families roll.
An absentee parent has forced the duo to turn to each other more than they would have if they were a larger unit: Gust’s dada and dadi are there for them, the genial former more than the self-absorbed latter who finds more pleasure from her antiques than in her living-breathing grandson and his mom, who has had to be strong for both of them, without anyone to catch her back.
Agastya’s parallel universe is full of multiple computer screens, an on-and-off ex-girlfriend (Celesti Bairagey), his college gang, and current preoccupations, which includes an attractive US-returned professor (Angira Dhar) whose love for numbers equals his.
These portions, where Gust and his pals — nice to see faces representing all parts of the country, including the North East, as well, of course, the brash Jat lad who gets to subvert a very Dilli joke — ‘tu jaanta nahi mera baap kaun hai’ — hang at their favourite Delhi University spots, are also mixed: a student wanting to jump off a high place has too little tension, while much more impactful is a loud party where irate landladies yell at the kids-making-too-much-noise. This one made me flash back to something similar in Axone, where the flatmates cooking up a Naga dish with a distinctly pungent smell leads to the unpacking of such thorny issues as racism, othering-and-belonging, and reconciliation in memorable ways.
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The best parts are the women having their say, loudly and clearly. Vinita doesn’t want to hurt her son, who has turned all huffy and unreasonable at her for having the temerity to find someone whom she vibes with: as a woman willing to be open and vulnerable in ways we do not often see in our fiction, Singh is a pleasure to watch. I was getting tired of her gangsta bit in her recent outings (Happy Patel, Subedaar): it’s nice to see her letting her hair down with a single-and-willing-to-mingle angel investor (Ranveer Brar), whose character leans into his offline chef persona with an ease which is greater than his previous performances (in a short and a feature).
The other interesting character is Dhar’s Professor Ira, young enough to remember what it was to be a student, blurring the boundary between how far she can go with one of her favourites, and where she draws the line. The moral policing of a good-looking woman is thrown in too, where themes like dating and finding the right partner are forced back into gendered boxes, even in so-called ‘liberal’ spaces in Delhi.
Ultimately, this matchmaker-matchmaker-make-me-a-match-with-math ends up peaking only sporadically, where we can see the balance the writers are having to create in order to please viewers across demographics– hola, Gen Z, millennials, and boomers: yes, Agastya uses that last descriptive as a throwaway, but not enough so that we don’t notice. Also, no girl will wander out into the night on her own and sit by herself on a Lodhi Colony sidewalk, even if she’s trashed: this is Delhi.
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Still, there’s the distinct effort to be different, laced with warmth and charm, and sometimes that’s enough to make you stay all the way.
Maa Ka Sum cast: Mona Singh, Mihir Ahuja, Celesti Bairagey, Angira Dhar, Ranveer Brar, Hetal Gada
Maa Ka Sum director: Nicholas Kharkongor
Maa Ka Sum rating: Two and a half stars
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