A DYSTOPIC LENS ON OUR HOSPITAL SYSTEM

Vipul Shah and Mozez Singh's little-talked about show, Human, bravely explores the macabre world where the medical profession is on trial, pronounced guilty, and sentenced to death

- Maithili Rao

Indian narratives don't favour dystopia, be it in films or on OTT platforms. Inexplicable optimism inspires our storytellers to provide utopian solutions, unlike the western imagination, where most memorable sci-fi and futuristic fantasies have a dark mood built into the narrative, even if it ends in ambivalence or ambiguity. The superheroes of the Marvel world are the exception, of course. It is as if an invisible force imposes a sanguine conclusion even to the darkest stories or biting satires told by our film-makers. This is something that has always puzzled me. When so many destructive forces – religious, ethnic, economic, and political - are tearing our society apart into warring factions, what explains this optimism? Is it the optimism of the doomed? Clutching at any survival straw? The alien in Hirani's PK was, to an extent, traumatised by his encounter with us, and we earthlings fumed at his presumption to lecture us. But he went back to his superior civilisation, sadly shaking his head at our stupidity, after uniting lovers across the Indo-Pak border and helping expose religious dogmatism and fake godmen.

But things are certainly changing. Has the pandemic, brought so horrifyingly alive by the media (and our personal experience), made us see the world hurtling towards death that doesn't make any distinction between the rich and poor, the developed and developing worlds? Now that dystopia is upon us, wrapping the world in its cold, clammy cloak of death foretold, Vipul Shah and Mozez Singh have stripped off our blinkers when it comes to the medical profession in the clutches of big pharma. The Hippocratic oath has degenerated into hypocritical self-aggrandisement. The wretched patient is sent to a painful, premature death since all of us do die at some point.