Pyar Ki Kashti Mein
About the show
Avinash Mehrotra is a snooty, Harvard-returned MBA. Love, women and marriage are the last thing on his mind at the moment.
Meenaxi Pillai is a pretty Malayalee girl with expressive eyes. A classical dancer and a school teacher by profession, she is simple, level headed, cultured and intelligent. A strong-willed girl, Minu believes in calling a spade a spade, and can be quite short-tempered at times.
They are diametrically opposite to each other.
Despite this, a tarot card reader predicts convinces Avinash’s mother, Manali and Meenaxi’s father, Eshwaran Pillai that Minu and Avi would make a perfect couple.
To put their plan into motion, the parents clandestinely plan to go on a month-long cruise which according to the prediction would be the ideal place for their children to fall in love.
Avinash Mehrotra: Twenty-eight years old, tall & good-looking, clean-shaven and close-cropped, cast in the classical “gora-chikna” mould Avinash is always impeccably turned out. He has a passion for investing in art, and is an oft-seen face at all art auctions, and art exhibitions. But he is very pragmatic about his patronage, and will make sure he gets value for his money.
He is very particular about hygiene & neatness, and is paranoid about getting his hands dirty, even to eat. In fact, he will skip the meal if there are no spoons or forks. He is probably the only man in his circle of friends who eats even a puri with a knife and a fork.
He is obsessed with the proper way of doing things, and is a stickler for table manners and etiquette. He is blunt in his equations with women, but he is very modern in his outlook towards them. He has absolutely no gender biases, but his attitude is clear… “Whether you are a man or a woman, you must earn what you are asking for. No short cuts, no compromises, no soft pedalling, just because it is a woman.”
He is not the kind who will hold the car door open for women, or pick her up for a date, because he believes in absolute equality. And what irritates him most is when a woman speaks of equality, but expects to be treated like a fragile thing when it suits her. This trait makes him come across as a rude person, but it takes a really progressive woman to understand his stance.
But he has a soft heart, and all his friends know that he falls for any sob-story told to him, and is only too willing to donate to various causes, without figuring out whether they are genuine or not. And he has a subtle sense of humour, and a flair for summing up any subject with a sharp and pungent one-liner, uttered with a dead-pan expression.
An ambitious young man of his times, his career takes precedence for him over everything else in life.
Minakshi Pillai: 24 years old, pleasant-looking, with wavy, shoulder-length hair that never seems to stay in place. Expressive eyes that seem to see straight into a person’s soul, but which can also dance with mischief and a sense of fun. A face that speaks of intelligence, strength of character and straight-forwardness.
Dressed in simple salwar-kameezes or kurti-skirt combinations, she presents a refreshing sight when she walks into the school where she works. For formal occasions, she opts for more earthy colours and silver jewellery, which she has a weakness for.
Loves to eat, the richer the dish the better, though she is lucky in that it never shows on her slim figure. She has a tendency to lapse into giggles at the slightest provocation, and once she begins, her laughter is so infectious that everyone around starts smiling as well.
She has absolutely no airs, and is equally at ease rolling up her sleeves to help move the chairs around at a school function, as she is holding forth to an erudite audience of academics and educationists at a seminar.
She also has the gift of putting people around her at ease, with her warm smile, and friendly overtures. She is cautious with money, and will think twice before buying anything for herself, but can splurge quite a bit while buying gifts for friends and family.
Minakshi has learnt Mohini Attam from her mother, who is a good dancer herself, but she is not obsessed with maintaining the purity of classical dance, like many others of her ilk. She feels as much creative satisfaction in choreographing a “Jadoo ka putla” or a “pumpkin dance” for the 7-year olds in the school concert, as she would in performing the “Krishna Leela” in the classical style.
Minakshi cannot suffer injustice or bureaucracy, and has been known to pick up a fight with a cabbie who refused to take on an old couple as passengers because he was winding up for the day, or to yell at little boys who were pelting a mongrel pup with stones.
She is naïve and hot-headed, with a tendency to judge people without much thought.
Manali Mehrotra: In her early fifties, she looks much younger, because of her well-maintained figure, and elegant dressing.
She has a fondness for corny jokes, and has a laugh that can be heard around the house. She is a cause of embarrassment for her husband and son quite often, when she shares a not so politically correct joke with the driver or the maid, and then laughs uproariously over it.
She has an insatiable curiosity about people, which stems from her large-heartedness, and she can often startle total strangers by asking them questions about intimate details of their life. But this is done with such an air of innocence, and genuine interest, that most people forgive her intrusion.
She does not believe in wasting money on luxuries, but is extremely generous when she deals with her maids or drivers, paying for the education of their children, and indulging them with goodies at every festive occasion.
Her only indulgences are regular visits to a spa, where she splurges on aromatherapy sessions. She is a sucker for the latest fads, and will try out anything from banana peel masks to green chilli therapy. Even here, she haggles with the management to get a good deal, but tips generously the girls who do the massage.
She loves playing poker, but her business acumen does not seem to work here. She has such a transparent face, that she loses with predictable regularity to her husband or her son. In fact, the family takes great care to ensure that she does not go overboard during Diwali, because she is capable of losing huge sums of money in the excitement of the game.
She thrives on Hindi films. She can cry over the most amateurish tragedies, laugh over the most inane comedies, and though she can never remember the names of any of the stars, she has a phenomenal memory for story-lines and songs, much to the amusement of her husband and son.
Her tastes are very simple still, and she worries when she observes the snobbish behaviour of her son, and his expensive and elitist tastes.
Eashwaran Pillai: 45 years old, Chief Engineer in one of the leading petrochemical companies in Mumbai. He is in awe of his wife’s many accomplishments, and lovingly likes to say, “Meet my sweet wife…I am her bitter half”, a statement which Yamini absolutely laps up, but to which she offers a half-hearted protest nevertheless, “Oh, don’t say that. I am nothing without your support”. But on these occasions, Eashwaran does get an extra helping of “payasam” lovingly poured on his plate.
Eashwaran prides himself on his cosmopolitan outlook…”Thanks to working in an Indian multi-national, you see…twenty years ago, when Mr. Bhansali decided to open a plant in Nigeria, he hand-picked me to set it up.” and he laughs modestly, implying that this accounted for his great sophistication. The fact however was that Eashwaran’s travels never took him beyond the African continent and Mauritius.
Mr. Bhansali, the company chairman, and his family were the subject of much discussion in the Pillai household…Many dinner table conversations centered around the marriage of Mr. Bhansali’s elder daughter to a tycoon in London (”such a wonderful family, you know…but it is still so sad to give away your daughter, Mr. Bhansali looks so lost these days”), the younger daughter eloping with her physical trainer (” what an ungrateful girl. How can she betray a father like Mr. Bhansali, imagine he gave her a Mercedes for her last birthday”), the demise of Mr. Bhansali’s mother ( “Mataji was his great inspiration, you know…brought him up single-handedly after the death of his father”),..and so saying, Eashwaran would wipe the tears that rolled down his cheeks.
Next to Mr. Bhansali, the person who evoked most Mr. Pillai’s admiration was Bhansali junior, Rupen, who having done his M.S from M.I.T, and his M.B.A from Harvard, had become Mr. Pillai’s boss…”Such a brilliant boy, and so successful at such a young age”. And a dreamy look would come into Eashwaran’s eyes, as he imagined his Minakshi married to a young man exactly like Rupen.
Rita: In her mid-thirties, she is the high-profile editor of the hi-society magazine, CELEB. Fashionably slim, but taking care to show her cleavage at all times, always immaculately made up and turned out, Rita oozes sex-appeal and a raw animal kind of magnetism.
She is a walking advertisement for all the most “happening” fashion labels in the world, and Givenchy, Dior, Louis Vuitton, Bvlgari, Hermes and Chanel jostle for space in her walk-in closet which is larger than the average middle-class Mumbai apartment. It did help that most of these were freebies, gathered over the course of a career spent in documenting the lives of the rich and famous.
Rita is on first name terms with almost everyone who was “anyone” in India, and to be on her “A” list is considered to be the ultimate sign of having “arrived”. She covets Avinash the minute she sets eyes on him, and decides to hook him, by means fair or foul. She realizes suddenly that her biological clock is ticking away, and that she needs to marry an eligible and successful young man.
Manav Menon: A charmer, in his late twenties, Manav is actually a con-man, who is on the run from the Indonesian police for having effected some very dubious financial deals and conned many innocent people out of their hard-earned money.
He falls hopelessly in love with Minu the moment he sees her, and believes he can win her over, and start life anew. What he does not realize that the bonds of love cannot be forged on the basis of untruths.
Manav is good-looking, sings well and has a droll sense of humour, but Minakshi still seems to prefer Avinash, and Manav cannot handle that … he becomes insanely jealous of Avinash and conspires with Rita to ruin that love story.