An unlikely “foreign-returned” hero sets out to meet prospective candidates for marriage. Yogesh Ishwarlal Patel’s guide: a book on zodiac signs and his survival instincts.
Mr Yogi, Ketan Mehta’s cotton-candy television comedy about getting hitched Indian style, does not survive most of our feminist, liberal, progressive, culturally sensitive and politically correct viewing standards. But then we were a different people in the 1980s. It did not matter if the suitable girl was too tall, too ambitious, too overbearing, too shy, too eager, too desperate or too rich. Each woman stood out, warts and all, next to the non-resident Indian suitor played by the late Mohan Gokhale. And it all added up to a jolly good laugh.
Watch this uproariously funny episode in which a tall woman has been forced to remain reclined on a traditional swing through her awkward matrimonial interview.
Or how a scholarly and seemingly clairvoyant woman and her menacing bouncer-brother get the better of Yogi, and set him up with a hotshot businesswoman played by Sushmita Mukherjee. You may see shades of the upcoming romcom Ki and Ka in the episode that paints Mukherjee in very broad strokes as an ambitious corporate cat who is armed with an elaborate pre-nuptial agreement. Yes, she also wants a house husband to cook when needed and run errands for her. Don’t wince. It was the ’80s, remember?
Yogi almost falls for a rich, dominating and gorgeous young woman, who makes him sit on a wooden horse in a carousel and pushes him around. As Yogi’s spindly legs dangle mid-air, he listens to her speak of how she loves a man who can stand on his feet, and gets misty-eyed.
Mr Yogi was the first adaptation of the novel Kimball Ravenswood by playwright and writer Madhu Rye. The ill-fated movie version What’s Your Rashee, directed by Ashutosh Gowariker in 2009 and starring Priyanka Chopra as all the women representing the 12 zodiac signs, was closer to the television version than the novel. While Chopra’s performance was commendable, the film bombed at the box office.
Harman Baweja was more suitable-boy material than Mohan Gokhale, but Gowariker was no comic genius. Neither was Baweja an actor. Ketan Mehta’s 13-episode version stood tall on the slender shoulders of Gokhale, who combined slapstick with urbane humour and worked the clichés (the “Main yaahaan ka pani nahin peeta” refrain, the Polaroid camera, the American “Hi” and the eager handshakes, and the hats, baggy pants, suspenders and coats).
Despite enjoying the upper hand early on in the interactions, YI Patel seems happy to be manipulated, cornered and confused. He even professes his love for a doctor who plays a serious prank on him. She makes him strip and gets another colleague to prick and poke him in the guise of checking for a fictitious disorder.
Despite the sexist undertones and the stereotypes, Mr Yogi lets the women enjoy the upper hand. That, probably, is YI Patel’s secret weapon.