Made in Heaven, an Amazon series conceptualized by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti, recites an anecdote of amphibians who have learnt to swim but are still fretful of water. Spread across distinctive episodes, Made in Heaven revolves around Tara (Sobhita Dhulipala) and Karan (Arjun Mathur), and their eponymous wedding planning company, targeting the city’s uber-rich. Each episode brings and highlights a new family and a story, with a set of efforts and recurring characters – the leads’ families and friends and the employees of Made in Heaven – who complete the series.
A web series offers a powerful explication about the vulgar display of power and wealth and its intersection with gender, class and society at large to piece together an impeccably feminist classic. Apart from its focus on high-profile, ostentatious weddings, the series also looks beyond the glitz and glamour and peeks into the scratchy, tottering layers that hide right beneath the deceptively smooth surface.
Although the series manages to portray it’s central theme of grandeur well in itself, on its periphery, it digs more inward into the increasing and imperious need to address to the psyche of an individual, group and community as a whole. It foregrounds current sociopolitical and sociocultural realities and juggles no opportunity to take fierce digs into societal realities. Homosexuality is one such factor which in this overly assorted jamming world has been knowingly kept at bay., and that this series audaciously have portrayed. The series also depicts the theme of infidelity which runs throughout and in conformity with that highlight the need to take therapy to grapple with minor and major issues. It Splendidly and fairly in line with real-life struggles and triumphs exhibits how Experiences and follies molds an individual into a modified human altogether.
Made in Heaven is essentially a show based on seemingly complex themes. It is about the struggle for acceptance and belonging, it’s about people’s yearning need for social support, societal acceptance and “good boy and good girl” portray, morality ambivalence in front of the highly judgmental society to bolster falling self-esteem alongside carrying the baggage of guilt, remorse, insecurities. It well defines the role of conformity, attributions, social cognitions, stereotypes etc. Furthermore, it exposes our vulgar infatuation with social perceptions, our all-consuming desire to be seen as fitting in an exclusive bracket, our enraged need for upward social mobility while those who aren’t rich are devising morally corrupt ways to reach there for approval of the outer world and one’s own self.
