Netflix India’s latest offering, the 8-episode Eternally Confused and Eager for Love, is a show about talking yourself down and sabotaging yourself through self-doubt. It’s relatable, all of us have been there. I, for one, related quite hard to the protagonist Ray’s inner voice constantly rolling out lists of all the things that could go wrong and how he is an embarrassment.
Ray, played by Vihaan Samat, is a 24-year-old Mumbai man desperate to make love and find love. But his inner voice, played by Jim Sarbh, knows the disaster Ray’s love life is.
What makes Ray relatable is that the show’s creator Rahul Nair never hides his flaws. Ray is at his vulnerable, problematic best. He is millennial, anxious, and often lonely. Samat plays the role flawlessly and carries on with the promise he showed in Mismatched. He is not given all the ‘immediately likeable’ traits. You feel for him, because you know that all of what he embodies are us, as real people, instead of the fronts we put up on our dating profiles, with the wittiest lines and best pictures.
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Self-sabotage
While mental wellness, and its associated terms are slowly entering our everyday vocabulary, they are still not easily accessible or understood. It is really heartening to see something like self-sabotage being dealt with in an OTT series. Most of us ask ourselves, ‘Why did I have to do that?’ Or ‘Why did I say anything at all?’
What exactly is self-sabotage? “Self-sabotage occurs when we destroy ourselves physically, mentally, or emotionally or deliberately hinder our own success and wellbeing by undermining personal goals and values,” writes Brad Brenner. Ray’s interactions are always coloured by self-loathing–he talks himself down so much that even when something good happens, he feels he does not deserve it. Relatable, right?
When someone says something as basic as, “It is good to finally meet you.”, Ray is almost always surprised. That is sometimes me, and many others I know. He stands up on his date because the woman looks too good to be true, and Ray cannot convince himself that someone hot can actually want him for him.
It is a real concern in the dating scenario.
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Clueless sidekicks
Jim Sarbh becomes the star of the show despite not being physically present in Eternally Confused and Eager for Love. His voice keeps you more engaged than Ray’s antics sometimes. And as a seamless duet, the combination shines. He plays a wizard keychain, Wiz, short for Wiz Khalifa, who is the constant voice pushing, shoving, hyping and delivering hard facts to Ray. It is Wiz who tells Ray that he has to sit with his feelings, before he can work on them, and that is really a shining moment, among many, in the show.
Ray’s schoolmate and only friend Dia, played by Dalai, and his engaged colleague Varun, played by Ankur Rathee, are the sidekicks, trying and failing miserably to set him up. While Varun’s advice can often be very questionable, which also stems from his ‘success rate’ with women, Dia tries her best to get Ray to be more confident around women.
The show is relatable mostly because nearly everyone messes up, in some way or another. No one has the answers. Not even Rahul Bose playing Ray’s father. Maybe that is why it feels like you are watching yourself on screen–constantly trying and failing to keep up with the world of dating, love and relationships.
Views are personal.