Cast of the collection within the poster. (Courtesy: X)

A gritty medical drama bolstered by sturdy performances and a screenplay that packs a stable punch, Mumbai Diaries Season 2, like Mumbai Diaries 26/11, blends the non-public with the skilled, and the personal with the general public, to piece collectively tales of surgeons and sufferers grappling with exigencies that unfold in a authorities hospital in the midst of a single day of unprecedented monsoon chaos.

In returning to the Bombay General Hospital for an additional deep dive into the workings of a medical facility bursting on the seams, collection creator and director Nikkhil Advani crafts a season that’s proper up there with its precursor. Well, nearly.

The new season of eight episodes, scripted by Yash Chhetija and Persis Sodawaterwalla with dialogues by Sanyuktha Chawla Shaikh, spotlights the indomitable spirit of the medical doctors, surgeons, nurses and ward boys of the hospital that helps them keep it up regardless. They are just about just like the teeming, bustling metropolis itself. They preserve going irrespective of how powerful the going will get.

Mumbai Diaries Season 2 makes use of the July 26, 2005 Mumbai floods as a flashpoint and tweaks the timeline to position the torrential rain and its repercussions at a degree that’s six months and a bit after the 2008 terror assaults that shook the metropolis and was powerfully dramatised within the present’s opening season in 2021.

Six months after Dr Kaushik Oberoi (Mohit Raina), the pinnacle and workhorse of the trauma surgical procedure division of Bombay General Hospital, is absolved of the cost of negligence throughout the Mumbai terror assaults on November 26, 2008, the skies dump extra rain on the town than ever earlier than and throw life on the streets utterly out of substances.

As the deluge worsens and the streets start to appear to be a warfare zone, Kaushik’s profession continues to be below a darkish cloud. Primetime TV information anchor Mansi Hirani (Shreya Dhanwanthary) topics the beleaguered surgeon to an unrelenting media trial and deceased Joint Commissioner of Police Anant Kelkar’s spouse, Savita (Sonali Kulkarni), information a homicide plea in courtroom.  

Dr Oberoi’s colleagues on the overstretched hospital, notably the chief medical officer Dr Madhusudan Subramaniam (Prakash Belawadi) and particular providers officer Chitra Das (Konkona Sen Sharma), stand by him though he’s technically barred from performing surgical procedures till the courtroom decides his destiny as a medical practitioner.

The rain unleashes bedlam of a magnitude by no means seen earlier than. A choose is unable to make it to the courtroom and the decision on the Dr Oberoi case is deferred by a number of days. A surgeon urgently wanted on the hospital is caught in visitors and is unable to make it to the OT. But the inflow of sufferers into the 1200-bed hospital doesn’t cease. It solely will increase because the rain and the resultant floods intensify.

The present is punctuated with lengthy takes and director of pictures Malay Prakash’s digicam usually snakes across the corridors and the interiors of the hospital, conveying a way of urgency and alarm because the surgeons race towards time to avoid wasting lives.  The hospital tackles “unlimited problems with limited resources.”

What Mumbai Diaries Season 2, which supplies nearly a blow-by-blow account of a 24-hour cycle within the lifetime of the hospital, does with a gradual hand is reveal the percentages that the surgeons and different personnel should confront day in and day trip, all in a day’s work.

And July 26 is under no circumstances an extraordinary day. It is an extended, chaotic, high-pressure day that witnesses a string of crises that take a heavy emotional toll on the hospital workers. The present elements within the systemic flaws that irritate issues for the primary responders – greed, corruption, the fragile energy dynamics that retains all people on edge and the fixed shortage of important medicines.

It is not the hospital alone that grapples with intrinsic distortions. The tv channel newsroom wherein Mansi works has its personal set of challenges that impacts her work. A juvenile remand house {that a} sub-plot is about in seems to be a den of irregularities. A younger man who’s wheeled in with second-degree burn accidents not solely fights for his life however can also be towards mean-spirited police overreach and extreme parental stress.

Well into the present, an overbridge collapse in a railway station – the mishap is drawn from an incident that in actuality occurred a decade later – exposes the twin scourge of company corruption and an tried media cover-up.  

The a number of strands of Mumbai Diaries Season 2 tackle the themes of sophistication, caste, politics, home violence and gender id. They additionally allude to indiscriminate development, unlawful dumping of waste and a choked river. Patients face life and demise conditions, the medical doctors wrestle to maintain fatigue at bay and the assist workers preserve chipping away even when the bottom ground and the basement of the hospital are inundated and change into all however inaccessible.

Employing an method that served Season 1 very properly, Mumbai Diaries alternates principally between the hospital and the streets have been pandemonium reigns supreme. As the town and its folks wrestle, private crises multiply within the lives of the hospital workers. 

Dr Oberoi’s pregnant spouse Ananya (Tina Desai), driving all the way down to Pune, is marooned on the best way. Chitra is caught unawares by the sudden reappearance of Dr Saurav Chandra (Parambrata Chattopadhyay), the abusive husband she ran away from two years in the past, as a part of a UK medical delegation.

Rookie resident surgeon Ahaan Mirza (Satyajeet Dubey), who has developed emotions for Chitra, finds himself going through emotional turmoil. Two of the opposite youthful medical doctors, Sujata Ajawale (Mrunmayee Deshpande) and Diya Parekh (Natasha Bharadwaj), who’re nonetheless within the means of discovering their ft, are thrown right into a state of affairs that places their endurance to the check.

In the ultimate episode, the present turns twisted and sinister as one of many key characters reveals his true colors. The in any other case even-handed narrative cedes a bit of floor to melodrama within the dying moments as bereavement, grief and self-assertion come to the fore in a rush. But that doesn’t overly upset the rhythm of the present.

A query that won’t have a direct bearing on the general impression of Mumbai Diaries Season 2 springs to thoughts (and it has most likely been requested earlier than instances with out quantity): how mandatory is the fixed harping on “the undying spirit of Mumbai”? It solely appears to cement narrative of hope manufactured to lull the citizenry – and the folks charged with operating the town – into complacency within the face repeated safety and municipal crises.

It might be time for Mumbaikars and reveals like this one to demand a greater deal from the authorities reasonably than purchase the road that nothing can ever fluster the folks of the town as they go about their lives. Seriously, which metropolis, or for that matter which village on this nation, ever grinds to a halt when calamity strikes? None ever has, does or will ever do. Living with reverses, be they man-made or pure, is our lot as Indians.

All stated and carried out, Season 1 was a tough act to comply with. Season 2 makes a good fist of it and delivers an eminently watchable and broad-based drama that leaves the viewers with a lot to mull over.