National Insecurity

How The Family Man champions the carceral security state / Film

- Suchitra Vijayan

The second season of The Family Man begins with Srikanth Tiwari, a former intelligence officer of TASC a fictitious intelligence agency akin to the Research & Analysis Wing working at an IT company. He writes “TPS reports” for an overbearing boss who calls him the “minimum guy.” He has replaced eating vada pav at ungodly hours on the streets with overpriced salads. He drops and picks up his kids from school, pines for his old job and is concerned about the newly-formed government in Pakistan all the while trying to salvage his crumbling marriage.

The Family Man has found tremendous success as a slick and funny espionage drama, particularly for its treatment of the protagonist, and even for “humanising” terrorists. As a spy working for TASC, Tiwari has to juggle being an underpaid government employee as well as an absent husband and a perpetually late and distracted father. Apart from his long-suffering wife, no one else in the family knows that he is a spy. To them he is a man who has settled into a job that has no future. However, at work, Tiwari is in his element. In the first season, when he and his team are tasked to thwart the terrorist attack “Operation Zulfiqar,” the plot moves from Mumbai to Kashmir. Along the way, we meet the men and women of TASC, dissenting students, ISIS terrorists and Pakistani military officers.