‘Maa Ka Sum’ Series Review: A Show About A Math Genius Succumbs to the Algorithm

The title, Maa Ka Sum, is the first sign. A sign that most modern young-adult (YA) dramas and campus comedies do not trust normal genre tropes anymore. There has to be a peg — a kind of character-driven or narrative gimmick that provides an edge to a conventional template. With Hindi productions, it’s usually in the packaging. While the phonetics of the title (an unfortunate riff on “maa kasam”) allude to a quirky mother-son story, the wordplay suggests that math might be the peg. The very first scene proves us painfully right: a heartbroken student is contemplating jumping off the terrace, and our protagonist, Agastya (Mihir Ahuja), appears with the smugness of a male angel and changes his mind by calculating the statistical probability of landing a new girlfriend in college. We get it: Agastya is a resident genius, an incorrigible geek, a whimsical whiz who relies on numbers and formulas and patterns rather than emotions. His personality is the packaging of Maa Ka Sum, an 8-episode dramedy about a gifted Delhi boy who is unhealthily attached to his single mother.  

So here's what his story reads like with the garnish. Agastya gets obsessed with creating a flawless dating algorithm…so that his mother Vinta (Mona Singh) can find the perfect man. Simultaneously, he's in a situationship with his ex-girlfriend Annie (Celesti Bairagey), but their college group remains thick as ever. He also finds a kindred soul in Ira (Angira Dhar), the attractive new visiting professor from Harvard who shares with him a passion for equation-crunching and neural jargon. When I say kindred soul, I mean Agastya believes the older woman is his soulmate; he has the numbers to back it. You know how it goes. Between his mom’s dating adventures, Ira’s enthusiasm and Annie’s unreciprocated love, the 19-year-old hero is allowed to be an absolute jerk to come of age — a teen version of those Bollywood-addled man-children who need to be healed at the altar of saner lives. Agastya is so clever that being difficult is his birthright.  

One of the problems with Maa Ka Sum is that it wants to be darker, but ironically, the streaming algorithm forces it to be cutesy and palatable. I’m all for normalising unlikable teens, complex relationships and feelings, but the series is almost oblivious to the gravity of its themes. As a result, the storytelling is more socially awkward than its central character(s). For instance, the oedipal tension between Agastya and his mother Vinta is reduced to a toxic PG-13 conflict. The boy forces his mother to date the men his code chooses. It goes from indulging in her son’s experiment to ceding control of her life to an arrogant and indecent kid; she has to lie to him — role-reversal and all — when she finds a man (Ranveer Brar) she likes on her own. Like a crabby patriarch aching to dominate his daughter, he throws tantrums every time he catches Vinta on an ‘illicit’ date; he questions the man and tries to malign him (in a weak thread involving online hacking and allegations of a “side chick”) because he’s out of Agastya’s syllabus. There’s something icky about Agastya’s passion, and the cool-mom-cool-son act in the beginning does little to justify it. I like that an Indian show at least calls out a liberal mother for romanticising the only-child syndrome, but the tone is never on the same page. Agastya needs therapy, he’s probably an aspiring sociopath, but he gets a redemption arc instead. 

Ditto for the other dimensions of his life. He somehow manages to look like the victim with Annie, an ex who’s so ‘protective’ of him that she even hides a pregnancy scare. He gets away with the whole troubled-genius shtick, because what’s a love triangle without a well-meaning professor who leads him on without really leading him on? Agastya’s journey with Ira is inevitable, and even though she isn’t judged by the show for getting tangled with a serious student, the series barely stops short of glorifying them (and her grooming) as misunderstood intellectuals. There’s a strangely staged acid-high party sequence that might go down as one of the more tone-deaf “romcom” moments of the year. It’s not that we are supposed to empathise with the adults or the teens, but their deficiencies are trivialised in pursuit of filmy resolutions.  

The series also struggles with the transitions between Agastya’s multiple mindspaces (mom, Ira, Annie, math). We often see the same scene greedily accommodating at least two or three of them at once — a big moment with Annie and friends often ends with a glimpse of his mother or Ira, and sometimes even those moments end with him seeing magic numbers (I will never forgive A Beautiful Mind) and cracking an equation out of nowhere. It’s like he isn’t allowed to simmer in one mood for more than a minute, because something else always comes along. I suppose life is like that, too, but you can tell when fiction tries to club different subplots as more of a shortcut than an aesthetic statement. The performances are nothing to write home about, but it’s not the actors’ faults. It feels like Mihir Ahuja has been playing a variant of this prodigy for years, and despite the author-backed role, Agastya remains more of a concept. The script doesn’t know what to do with so many shades in one boy, so it treats him as different boys instead. The genius feels so ornamental that he becomes just another cloying teen after a while. It’s been the era of Mona Singh lately, but Maa Ka Sum is the rare thing she’s touched that hasn’t turned to gold. The character she plays is fascinating and layered, but the series frames Vinta as a woman shackled by a clingy man rather than a clingy mother who’s had to grow up with her son. This is very much her story, yet she is reduced to a dizzy star in her adolescent boy’s orbit. He does have mommy issues — evident from how the series first introduces them together at a “dinner date” as if they’re an age-gap couple — but they’re smoothened and sanitised in service of a familiar fix.  

Finally, we need to talk about Agastya’s math. The idea is to show him in an abusive relationship with the subject. It’s clear early on that the moral of this story will be that numbers and compatibility formulas do not include the variables of human nature. He will learn this the hard way; his pet algorithm — like the show he’s in — is too mechanical to understand the summations of the heart. He’s all theory, and this is his practical. It’s the slice-of-life equivalent of the NTSC hearing in Sully, where the Captain (Tom Hanks) explains that the pilot simulations do not take into account the “X-factor” of reacting like a human. Why this precise lesson is stretched across 8 episodes here is anyone’s guess, but I suspect it has much to do with a man’s ego and his desire to be proven right at any cost. It’s an intense trial by fire. Tell that, however, to a show that refuses to heed the paradox of placing the ambivalence of emotions over the dryness of digits. Boys like Agastya will be tamed for growing up to become trade analysts who associate box-office figures with the quality of cinema. But he will remain a peg for a show that depends on eyeballs.