'Bakaiti' Series Review: Family Comedy-Drama Sticks to the Brief

Kambal kutai (literally: 'blanket thrashing') is a wonderful phrase, a playful colloquialism for a painful punishment, familiar to anyone who's done time in a North Indian boys' hostel. When a character in Bakaiti uses the same phrase, it sounds benign, unthreatening. It sits well on the Katarias, a family so constantly embattled and uproarious they would love to give each other a good hiding, but softly.

Ameet Guptha's series has a softness and warmth that feels almost market-enforced. It wants to be 'sweet' and 'relatable' instead of specific and probing. It wants to do for its platform what multiple seasons of Gullak did for theirs. The ingredients are pungent and promising, from dashed dreams to buried insecurities, even if the final dish tastes mild.

After a generic early-morning montage, a brisk travelling shot takes us into the world of the show. Sanjay Kataria (Rajesh Tailang) is a middle-class lawyer living and working in Ghaziabad. He's the sole earner of his family, which comprises his wife Sushma (Sheeba Chaddha), kids Naina (Tanya Sharma) and Bharat (Aditya Shukla), plus Sanjay's couch-bound, hard-of-hearing father-in-law. Sanjay's practice is stalling, in a crushing economy, so the family urgently needs another income source.

Their first solution is to rent out one of the children's rooms... but which one? Teen-aged Naina and Bharat are always squabbling, calling each other 'Miss Indrapuri' and 'Jahangirpuri ka Virat Kohli'. Neither party is willing to cede ground, forcing the family to look in other directions. A sandwich stall is suggested, then a soda shop. Naina, who's applying to colleges in Mumbai, proves the most enterprising, coming up with 'Zero Investment' plans. Kitchen-bound, all-managing Sushma seizes on a rare window of opportunity to start a boutique from home. The success and failure of these micro enterprises keeps the show humming for seven, short-length episodes.

The second episode, set around a funeral, is funnily written and paced. Minor details shine through, like a repurposed gift revealing fissures in the extended family. But writers Gunjan Saxena, Neha Pawar and Sheetal Kapoor frequently pivot to half-measures. Conflicts and crises funnel up realistically only to simmer down, happy guitar strums on the soundtrack signalling a release of emotions. A flare-up in one of the later episodes convinced me of a genuine escalation; yet, soon enough, it's back to repeat-and-reset, like the water tank alarm that keeps buzzing through the show.

Sanjay emerges the most lived-in character, a woebegone patriarch not above frustration and pride, fighting multiple fires on every front. The unshowy Rajesh Tailang is measured and efficient as ever, as is Chaddha as the busybody Shushma. Their handful of scenes together, in the absence of the children, are the best in the show. Notice the slight shudder in Sanjay's voice ("aaj... baat karunga main”) when exhorted firmly by his wife to address the kids. There is also the lovely moment where Sushma, at a juncture appropriate for expressing grief, instead expresses relief. Bakaiti means idle chatter; Tailang and Chaddha lend it some meaning, and feeling.