Vision of the Paradise is Beyond Imagination

In a hilarious scene in Netflix's latest spy-thriller series, Saare Jahan Se Accha, one of RAW's undercover operatives in Pakistan loses it towards his handlers.

- AVINASH RAMACHANDRAN

"My body would have been floating in some gutter, and you guys would still be busy changing soaps." It's a reference to an earlier sequence, where he finds a message from his bosses inside a soap cake. It's one of the rare instances when a moment or a stray line of dialogue springs up from the show's genre restraints. Another is when an agent is jealous of his colleague who is operating from Paris ("While we are sweating it out here in Pakistan, he is the one who has got the 'real' foreign posting"). It brings life into an otherwise straight-line narrative. It's amusing when art goes meta.

But Saare Jahan Se Accha has no time for fun and games. It's the 70s. Physicist Homi Bhabha is dead, and so is India's hope of becoming a nuclear nation. On the other hand, Pakistan is scheming to assemble a bomb, and now it is up to the newly formed Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) to foil their plans. The nascent agency is supervised by RN Kao (Rajat Kapoor), based on the real-life spymaster who served as the first chief of RAW. He sends his subordinate, Vishnu Shankar (Pratik Gandhi), to Pakistan to manage and

conversations over park benches to cameras hidden in cigarette lighters and pens containing recording devices. Everything is competent, but nothing is revelatory. However, where the series scores are in fleshing out its 'villainous' characters. Sunny's Murtuza isn't just pure evil. There is an emotional complexity he showcases as he hugs a teenager whose father he has killed just moments before, as he was revealed to be a traitor. Thankfully, Pakistanis are not reduced to a bunch of 'maqsad'-spewing buffoons and are given proper motivation and arcs.