Panchayat

The Hindi-language series Panchayat is available for streaming on Amazon Prime, and it is hilarious.  I would say that it is a re-hash of Northern Exposure   translated into twenty-first century India, but I have never watched Northern Exposure – and the fish-out-of-water trope pre-dates 1990.  I think that a good premise for a sitcom would be for a down-state couple (say, a creative type and a child psychologist, two old hippies or a Bernie-voting Lesbian couple with a daughter who is too smart for her own good) to move into a mobile home park in Chemung County.  The running gag would be that the new residents like rednecks, but only in the abstract.

Maybe I’ll write it.

In Panchayat, Abhishek, a young middle-class engineer from a large city, takes a job as the secretary of a village council in a rural part of Uttar Pradesh.  The joke is that he is a city boy in the country.  When he first shows up for the job, he tries to shake hands with the mayor of the town, Brij Bhushan (Bhushan is not really mayor – his harridan wife, Manju Devi, is the notional mayor because of gender quotas – but he is the outside man).  Bhushan is just back from his fields and says, “Let me wash my hands first.  I just took a crap.”  Bhushan discovers that he has lost the key to the council office, where Abhishek will live.  He remembers that he had carried it in his pocket, so he suspects that it fell out when he squatted, so he, Abhishek and two hangers-on take a tour of Bhushan’s fields to look for it.  At one point, Abhishek says, “Didn’t you just say you took your crap there?  Why are we looking here now?”, to which one of the hangers-on says, “You really are from the city.  When you take a crap outside, you don’t do it all in one place.”

Abhishek works for the national civil service, but he works closely with Bhushan, and part of his job is to work as a liaison between national and local government.  In one episode, he receives orders from his official boss, a civil servant employed by the federal government, to have “nudge”-type family planning slogans painted at different places in the town.  One of them reads, “One or two children are sweet as honey.  Three or more are like a case of hemorrhoids” (full disclosure: the subtitle reads ‘piles’.  I could not read the Hindi.).  That pisses off villagers who have more than two children.  In one scene, a man with two daughters and a toddler son walks by as the slogan is being painted on a wall.  The daughters start pointing at the boy and chanting, “You’re a case of pi-les!  You’re a case of pi-les!”  The boy asks his father, “What is ’piles’?”.  The father calls over his friend, who has four children, to show him the slogan.  The men tell Bhushan, “You just lost our vote.”

Afraid of losing the next election, Bhushan asks Abhishek to paint over the slogans.  This puts Abhishek in the uncomfortable position of being squeezed between two parties with divergent agendas.  He asks his direct report if he can get rid of the slogans.  His boss says, “Absolutely not.  I have my orders.  This comes straight from the top.” 

Bhushan and Abhishek meet with the civil servant to see if they can’t find a solution.  Bhushan brings a large gourd from his field as a present.  Before they enter the office, he hands it to Abhishek and says, “You give it to him!”  Abhishek says,

“Why me?” 

“Just do it!”

Abhishek’s face reflects the woes of the middle manager caught between two millstones, neither of which he much cares for.

The camera then cuts to a scene of Bhushan and Abhishek on one side of a desk, a stuffy-looking middle-aged man on the other side, and a large gourd sitting on the desk, with its blossom end pointing toward Abhishek and Bhushan and its stem end pointing toward the civil servant.  The civil servant says, “You know that I can’t take bribes.  Unfortunately, orders are orders.”  Abhishek and Bhushan protest, and the civil servant askes them to leave.  As they stand up, Bhushan makes to take the gourd with him.  The civil servant puts his hand on the gourd and gives a head wag.  “Leave it”, he says.  Abhishek and Bhushan leave the office deflated.

Bhushan complains to his wife that the situation will cost him the next election.  She tells him to be a man.  “Stand up to these people!  Your campaign slogan can be that you have a backbone!” The joke, of course, is that Bhushan has no backbone.  Whatever backbone he has is the product of his wife’s nagging.

Bhushan convenes a council of aldermen.  He tells them that he is going to stand by the slogans.  “If anyone pushes back”, he says, “Make me the bad guy.  They can blame me”.  One of the aldermen speaks up brightly, “So – we can blame you?”  “That’s right”.  A room full of heads wag, and a murmur of assent goes through the group.

As the council is filing out of the building, Abhishek’s phone rings.  It is his boss, the civil servant.  He says that Abhishek can paint over the slogans.  Family planning policy has changed.  It appears that the gourd has done its work.

Abhishek, who wears skinny jeans and spends most of his time studying for the Indian version of the GMAT, looks at the camera with a “Why me?”, or a “Beam me up, Scotty” look.  Cut to closing credits.

This morning, Mike, the manager at my park in northern New York texted me to say that one of the residents, a guy who I will call Joe Gutierrez here, had a septic problem.  Half an hour later, Mike called me.  I said, “What’s up?”  He said,

-You sound terrible.

-I have COVID.

-Uh-oh.

-It’s like a case of the flu.  It is more of an annoyance than anything. Thank G-d I’m vaccinated.

-Don’t come up here.

-There are some people in the other park I would like to slobber on.

Mike told me what had happened.  The Gutierrez’ septic line had gotten clogged.  They called Jet-O-Rooter to blast it, which Jet-O-Rooter did.  While the line was being jetted, two lengths of pipe under the home became detached from each other.  Joe asked them to put the two pipes back together; Jet-O-Rooter said that they would do that, but that there would be a charge.  Joe said, “No thanks.  We can live with it like this.”

After Jet-O-Rooter left, the Gutierrezes used the bathroom.  Their effluvia dropped onto the ground in the crawl-space inside the skirting.  After a few days, the neighbors noticed the smell and called Mike.  When Mike told me that I said, “Doesn’t that idiot know that shit flows downhill?”

-Hah, hah.  He said that he thought the pipe was only partly broken.

-Doesn’t he know that shit can ooze through a partly broken pipe as well as through an entirely broken pipe?  It is not a Newtonian fluid!

-Abhishek!  I am just the messenger!

Mike called me by my real name, not ‘Abhishek’.  I said,

-Sorry.  It’s the COVID talking.

-So, what do we do?

-Fix it.  I will pay you and charge them.

-What if he stiffs you?

-Then, I eat it.

The corner of my eye twitched at that last bit.  That is because, in the real world, there is no beginning, middle and end or B-plot, and there is no camera that you can scowl at to make meta-commentary with your eyebrows.  There is just a tall capital stack and a rude stream of sense data, a set of algorithms that were useful in decoding same when you lived on the African Savannah several lakhs and crores of years ago but not so much anymore, and an endless stream of decision-tree nodes.  And, if you are lucky, a positive P&L at the end of the month.