It requires a special kind of masochism to order food for a group of people at work. Everyone’s talking over each other, demanding elegant modifications, changing their mind over and over again, and basically just being complete chumps. The opening scenes of the new season of Better Life Foundation (BLF), available on the often infuriating Hotstar interface, amplify this everyday episode to a farcical nonsense. A wrong number leads to everyone on both ends of the line ordering food from each other — not a restaurant in sight — until office killjoy Sumukhi Chawla walks in and puts an end to the circus.
BLF is postmodern high farce. A workplace comedy about a struggling NGO that wants to build toilets, the show tracks the peculiarities of its incompetent/ disinterested workforce, held together by tape and glue by company head Neil Menon (Naveen Richard), and Chawla (Sumukhi Suresh), the one actually doing all the work.
Toilet humour
Before going further, let’s address the fact that this is a pretty straightforward pastiche of The Office (the American version); it’s shot in a mockumentary style — with plenty of sardonic glances at the camera — and Richard draws heavily from the bumbling-idiot-with-a-good-heart characterisation of The Office’s Michael Scott. Chawla serves almost as audience surrogate, shooting exasperated glares at the camera each time Menon does something stupid. Over the six episodes this season, they mine the office environment for awkward humour through a comedy of errors, uncomfortable silences and inappropriate, cringeworthy conversations, and the general minutiae of work.
While the five-episode long first season (released in 2016) spent far more time driving the plot forward, the new season sees them relying more on the central push-pull relationship between Chawla and Menon, constantly at loggerheads and just as often out of their depths. They get a grant to build toilets in collaboration with a rival NGO, causing some friction between the two. Supporting them is a crew of misfits: the pot-addled conspiracy theorist and rebel lacking any cause whatsoever, Jerry; the idealistic and naïve intern no one takes seriously, Aditi; the smug but weary slacker expertly hiding his anxieties behind a façade of contempt, Armaan; and their accountant, Anirban, pulling elaborate scams in plain sight, played quite brilliantly by Kumar Varun. Adding external conflict is the condescending head of the rival NGO, Anu, who pities BLF but is also seemingly quite fond of them.
The writing is more tight, with the show spending time trying to understand the motivations of its principal characters and focussing on the interpersonal relationships. The cringe factor is heightened, often at the cost of an easy joke, with deliberately drawn-out trainwreck conversations and self-aware exchanges rooted in absurdism. The show is at its finest when it’s in low-stakes territory, just letting the characters be themselves. It plays off the wonderful chemistry between Suresh and Richard: Menon spiralling after an off-hand remark at a party and blowing the grant, or Chawla getting increasingly agitated by Menon’s obvious insecurities. Even the product placements here — an excruciating but perhaps necessary evil in such web series — are presented with an ironic nod and tongue firmly in cheek, slotted seamlessly into the non-sequitur conversation the show resides in.
Best bet
It falters whenever it goes broad, from Jerry devising a plan to spike a corporate fat-cat’s drink or the owner of a third NGO sipping her wine one second, and passed out at her desk clutching the bottle of wine the very next, snoring exaggeratedly. BLF’s strengths are in the heightened realism of its NGO world and the inner dynamics of its characters.
This is really what a workplace is, isn’t it? A source of constant existential amusement and frustration. The trivialities of daily existence — What should we eat? Where do all the staplers keep disappearing to? Why is he so dressed up? What’s up with the boss’s inability to sign his name correctly? — worth no more than a passing thought or two, get heightened when you’re confined in an office. Each tiny decision takes on the weight of the world. The scope that BLF covers is no doubt wider, but for me, it’s in these moments of frivolity and pettiness where it’s at its best.
The freelance culture writer from New Delhi wishes he’d studied engineering instead.
