Review | 'Mumbai Diaries 26/11' is high-pitched and melodramatic

Konkana Sen Sharma and Mohit Raina (centre) have the most detailed roles in 'Mumbai Diaries 26/11', although a lot of what really drives them is left ambiguous, mostly in an unsatisfactory way.

A government-run hospital in short supply of equipment, overworked doctors at its trauma surgery wing whose job it is to save lives with or without that equipment, decrepit corners with open makeshift spittoons—producer-director Nikhil Advani sets his series Mumbai Diaries 26/11 in one such government-run hospital in Mumbai, the Bombay General Hospital. The series streams on Amazon Prime Video from September 9.

Directors Advani and Nikhil Gonsalves, and writers Nikhil Gonsalves, Yash Chhetija, Anushka Mehrotra and Sanyuktha Chawla Shaikh, make this hospital a noisy cauldron of exasperated doctors, bulldozed nurses and distressed patients.

The eight-episode series begins with a lot of noise—screams, crashes, beeps and thuds, and builds up a hurricane of chaos that unfolds on that day in November 2011 when some of South Mumbai’s iconic establishments of modernity—the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the Taj Mahal Palace, the Oberoi Trident, Leopold Café, Metro Cinema—were under siege. Armed terrorists also infiltrated Nariman House and the Cama and Albless Hospital.

Advani and his team of writers zero in on how those 60 hours were for the medical workers of that hospital—fictionalising characters, scenes and situations, and building up a backstory of the characters that inhabit its corridors and wards, humanising them, before the terror hits them with unparalleled force.

How does humanity thrive and save the day in such catastrophic boil? How do doctors remain stoic? Do they?

Mumbai Diaries 26/11 tries to make sense of the lives of government medical staff by sifting through the course of events that played out at the hospital when two of the terrorists on the loose enter the hospital. (The pandemic reminds us yet again that frontline medical workers in our government hospitals are in perennial jeopardy.) Couched as a thriller connecting dots, leading to an edge-of-the-seat shootout climax, the series is a tribute to the warriors who, in the line of duty, fester in disappointments and frustration but always rise to save the day.

The build-up is slow. It’s established that Dr Kaushik Oberoi (Mohit Raina), the head of the trauma surgery department, is seasoned at bypassing the system to take chances with patients who land up on one of his beds with little hope to make it. An absentee husband, he is on the verge of losing his wife whom he cherishes, but doesn’t have the emotional intelligence to salvage his marriage. Ananya, his wife (Tina Desai), is part of the administrative service staff at the Palace Hotel, which is modelled on the events inside The Taj Mahal Hotel. Dr Chitra Das (Konkona Sen Sharma) is no less a maverick—the hospital’s social services director, she carries the baggage of traumatic domestic abuse, and is a strange, unconvincing samaritan (she has managed to keep an ageing lady abandoned by her children in one of the hospital’s beds for three years!). Three interns happen to join Dr Oberoi’s team that day: Diya Parekh (Natasha Bharadwaj), granddaughter of the founder of the hospital and daughter of a legendary doctor who incidentally is the star of a felicitation ceremony at the Palace Hotel the same evening, Sujata Ajawale (Mrunmayee Deshpande), a small-town doctor fresh out of medical college who resents the nepotism she already smells when she sees how Diya is treated at the hospital on their first day, and Ahaan Mirza (Satyajeet Dubey) whose “rational-scientific” temper is a vehicle for staid and lazy political correctness to portray Muslim-ness.

Also read: Konkona Sen Sharma: "'Mumbai Diaries 26/11' is our tribute to the frontline workers"

Together, this team is a repository of angst and regrets, as well as a steely will to brave anything that comes their way. They flounder and fight. This is the only novel thing about this series. Despite patchy—and some ludicrous—characters graphs, the universe of a medical team hamster-wheeling their way to make a dysfunctional government medical system work is the heart of Mumbai Diaries 26/11.

The news studio is another high-stress boiler room from where emerges Mansi Hirani (Shreya Dhanwanthary), a TV journalist with blood-curling insensitivity towards anything and anybody who comes in the way of her “exclusive”—yet another lazily written, exaggerated version of monstrous TRP-chasers we are used to seeing on Indian screen.

Most films centred around epic events like 26/11 or 9/11 often fall short because these events have lingering, devastating effects on our collective as well as personal memory. We have lived through these events, and felt their horror. Advani is known for big-scale, hyperbolic treatments—an assured Bollywood mainstream mind. The treatment here is no different. Beyond the real sounds of a hospital on a day like 26/11, the background sounds and music hammer in for intended effect but at times make the cacophony hard to endure. The storytelling has no inventiveness or surprise.

Some of the performances lift the scenes out of the blitzkrieg of busy frames and layers of sound. Sen Sharma is effective as usual in her depiction of the middle-class Everywoman—determined, with a mind of her own, but without a trace of brazenness. She and Raina as Rebel Doctor have the most detailed roles, although a lot of what really drives them is left ambiguous, mostly in an unsatisfactory way. Dhanwanthary channels the hard-nosed journalist with a monotone performance—almost like a hangover from her role as journalist Sucheta Dalal in the hit series Scam.

The allure of a major real world event for filmmakers, the desire to be first, no matter the cost, often leads to projects that don’t tell a difficult story in the most effective way or at the right time. Ten years on, with time to reflect and re-examine, expectations can be high. In tone and treatment, Advani chooses to stay firmly in the high-pitched and melodramatic Bollywood orbit. Mumbai Diaries 26/11 will hopefully be remembered for its heart—a heart for medical workers like Dr Chitra and Dr Oberoi and the retinue of staff who always show up and deliver. That itself is such a wonderful thing.