johnnylingo

Sure is "chilling" far cry from the original show.

Upside - the elaborate sets are high-budgeted and well put together. What I like about this show is how you can feel like you're actually in the setting with the characters.

Downside - too much woke ideology. I'd say the show has earned a woke-rating of about 8/10.

This episode where Scaachi Koul purported to "investigate" the men's rights movement turned out to be nothing more than a documentary about "what Koul thinks about the men's rights community". The episode appeared more focused on her rather than the crying men in the middle of the room. After interviewing interviewees, she would insert a side scene expressing her own opinions about what the interviewee said, rather than ask the interviewees questions based on those perspectives head on. She also appeared blatantly more willing to take the female interviewees' words at face value rather than the male ones.

Taking into consideration the rule of impartiality and journalistic due diligence, I ultimately felt I learned very little about the men's rights community. If you learn nothing from a story, article, or documentary, then the journalist has failed at doing its job. It appears to me that Koul failed to perform her job as a journalist in this episode.

It appeared Perkins was trying to make this more of a documentary about female gender issues in India, rather than a holistic breakdown of socio-economic life along the millenia-old Ganges, as it is in the 21st Century.

In episode 2 (I believe) for example, the majority of the episode was devoted to a group of school girls. Only a slight bit of the episode was actually devoted to the story of a potato farmer, a pariah community of (originally male) transgender people, and an annual Hindu Ganges religious festival. Apart from the potato farmer who only got less than 5 minutes of screen time, I didn't feel I learned much about the economy, local government, agriculture, business, the education system, population strains, or wealth gaps of the entire society.

For someone who's had no prior knowledge of India before watching this documentary, you'd get the impression that Indian men are doing well and Indian women are perpetually oppressed. Never mind that overpopulation, poverty, and a dangerously wide wealth gap affects both men and women.

If Perkins be the type who is for gender equality, I find it extremely ironic that she was catcalling and making objectifying remarks at local Indian men. She even once uttered a flirtatious purr at a groom during a pre-wedding get-together. Now I wonder how that flew given India's conservative culture.