Since OTT platforms took over home entertainment, plenty of gritty thrillers and pacy crime shows have exposed the reality of survival in small-town India. The hard-hitting Mirzapur or Pataal Lok explore violence with a clear gaze, threading together the invisible connections between poverty, ambition and ruthlessness. The travails of life-on-the-fringes is well documented but very little fresh content realistically captures India’s well heeled. So far, attempts to log this segment has produced over-the-top cringe like Four More Shots Please or The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives that lazily reinforce rich-people stereotypes. Class, that recently dropped on Netflix, has a more nuanced perspective on the rarefied elite, the action taking place in an exclusive Delhi school, ironically named Hampton International (a clever reference to the summer refuge of fashionable New Yorkers).
Carefree childhoods, like fairies, are a pipe dream, going by the truly awful melodramas of binges, bullying and spiteful rivalries playing out among the 16-year-olds on this show. The mere presence of three determined scholarship students from the wrong side of the Capital, and the wrong caste and religion creates existential turbulence in the cosseted lives of their privileged classmates, who wear their entitlement like a birthright. For all the preaching on inclusivity, transcending a background where one’s accent to one’s shoes are starkly different, remains depressingly tough. To the director’s credit, Class holds up an accurate (if disturbing) mirror on the banal preoccupations of spoilt young Delhiites; the mothers come off just as badly using their children to social climb into more exalted circles, all the while exerting performance pressure because their self esteem (or lack of) is tied up with their progeny’s achievements.
For some context, people who grew up in pre-liberalization India and spent childhoods slaving for highly competitive entrance examinations, perhaps, entirely naturally, want to spare their kids a hard and painful slog. Terms like “burn out” and “me time” didn’t exist in the 1980s and 1990s, everyone relentlessly persevered to climb their way out of frugality. The explosion of wealth in India since then has allowed a certain section of parents the option to breathe easier, even, indulgently allow their kin to pursue sports and other hobbies guilt free (something they were denied). But the flip side to getting used to a cushy, easy breezy existence is, it kills hunger. There’s no chase. Or reward. And lo and behold, it turns out instant gratification isn’t all it’s cut out to be.
It’s a delicate balance, bringing up competitive strivers without causing them mental agony, and I don’t know a single affluent parent who thinks they’ve figured this out right. Meanwhile, the risque teenagers in Class do drugs lavishly and make out with reckless abandon. Needless to say, every hedonistic act is duly recorded for Instagram. The show cleverly displays the treacherous landscape of social media that’s almost dystopic, since popularity among teenagers nowadays is entirely based on Followers and Likes. From the outside, everything seems wildly glamorous. No wonder, there’s a tendency to disregard rich-people angst with sneering condescension. After all, how dare they complain when the rest of the world is just about scraping by with so much less?
Alas, nobody escapes ennui and frustration. No doubt, issues are easier to handle couched in luxury without worries of EMIs or college fees. Still, the truth is that even if one is fortunate enough to escape financial stresses, anxiety shows up in other ways, not necessarily any less stressful. One of the troubled characters on Class, born to power but intellectually lost, seems no better off than her love interest, the Hindi-speaking outsider struggling to fit in. Sure, money matters most, when you don’t have it. But over a lifetime, the universe tends to throw up a variety of curveballs and absolutely nobody is guaranteed a permanent spot in paradise.
The writer is director, Hutkay Films