Mumbai Diaries 2 Review: Gritty Medical Drama Is Bolstered By Strong Performances

A gritty medical drama bolstered by strong performances and a screenplay that packs a solid punch, Mumbai Diaries Season 2, like Mumbai Diaries 26/11, blends the personal with the professional, and the private with the public, to piece together stories of surgeons and patients grappling with exigencies that unfold in a government hospital in the course of a single day of unprecedented monsoon chaos.

In returning to the Bombay General Hospital for another deep dive into the workings of a medical facility bursting at the seams, series creator and director Nikkhil Advani crafts a season that is right up there with its precursor. Well, almost.

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 doctors, surgeons, nurses and ward boys of the hospital that helps them carry on regardless. They are pretty much like the teeming, bustling city itself. They keep going no matter how tough the going gets.

Mumbai Diaries Season 2 uses the July 26, 2005 Mumbai floods as a flashpoint and tweaks the timeline to place the torrential rain and its repercussions at a point that is six months and a bit after the 2008 terror attacks that shook the metropolis and was powerfully dramatised in the show's opening season in 2021.

Six months after Dr Kaushik Oberoi (Mohit Raina), the head and workhorse of the trauma surgery department of Bombay General Hospital, is absolved of the charge of negligence during the Mumbai terror attacks on November 26, 2008, the skies dump more rain on the city than ever before and throw life on the streets completely out of gear.

As the deluge worsens and the streets begin to look like a war zone, Kaushik's career continues to be under a dark cloud. Primetime TV news anchor Mansi Hirani (Shreya Dhanwanthary) subjects the beleaguered surgeon to an unrelenting media trial and deceased Joint Commissioner of Police Anant Kelkar's wife, Savita (Sonali Kulkarni), files a murder plea in court.  

Dr Oberoi's colleagues at the overstretched hospital, notably the chief medical officer Dr Madhusudan Subramaniam (Prakash Belawadi) and special services officer Chitra Das (Konkona Sen Sharma), stand by him although he is technically barred from performing surgeries until the court decides his fate as a medical practitioner.

The rain unleashes bedlam of a magnitude never seen before. A judge is unable to make it to the court and the verdict on the Dr Oberoi case is deferred by a few days. A surgeon urgently needed at the hospital is stuck in traffic and is unable to make it to the OT. But the influx of patients into the 1200-bed hospital does not stop. It only increases as the rain and the resultant floods intensify.

The show is punctuated with long takes and director of photography Malay Prakash's camera often snakes around the corridors and the interiors of the hospital, conveying a sense of urgency and alarm as the surgeons race against time to save lives.  The hospital tackles "unlimited problems with limited resources."

What Mumbai Diaries Season 2, which provides almost a blow-by-blow account of a 24-hour cycle in the life of the hospital, does with a steady hand is reveal the odds that the surgeons and other personnel have to confront day in and day out, all in a day's work.

And July 26 is by no means an ordinary day. It is a long, chaotic, high-pressure day that witnesses a string of crises that take a heavy emotional toll on the hospital staff. The show factors in the systemic flaws that aggravate matters for the first responders - greed, corruption, the delicate power dynamics that keeps everybody on edge and the constant scarcity of essential medicines.

It isn't the hospital alone that grapples with intrinsic distortions. The television channel newsroom in which Mansi works has its own set of challenges that impacts her work. A juvenile remand home that a sub-plot is set in turns out to be a den of irregularities. A young man who is wheeled in with second-degree burn injuries not only fights for his life but is also against mean-spirited police overreach and severe parental pressure.

Well into the show, an overbridge collapse in a railway station - the mishap is drawn from an incident that in reality occurred a decade later - exposes the dual scourge of corporate corruption and an attempted media cover-up.  

The multiple strands of Mumbai Diaries Season 2 address the themes of class, caste, politics, domestic violence and gender identity. They also allude to indiscriminate construction, illegal dumping of waste and a choked river. Patients face life and death situations, the doctors struggle to keep fatigue at bay and the support staff keep chipping away even when the ground floor and the basement of the hospital are inundated and become all but inaccessible.

Employing an approach that served Season 1 very well, Mumbai Diaries alternates principally between the hospital and the streets were pandemonium reigns supreme. As the city and its people struggle, personal crises multiply in the lives of the hospital staff. 

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

Rookie resident surgeon Ahaan Mirza (Satyajeet Dubey), who has developed feelings for Chitra, finds himself facing emotional turmoil. Two of the other younger doctors, Sujata Ajawale (Mrunmayee Deshpande) and Diya Parekh (Natasha Bharadwaj), who are still in the process of finding their feet, are thrown into a situation that puts their staying power to the test.

In the final episode, the show turns twisted and sinister as one of the key characters reveals his true colours. The otherwise even-handed narrative cedes a little ground to melodrama in the dying moments as bereavement, grief and self-assertion come to the fore in a rush. But that does not overly upset the rhythm of the show.

A question that may not have a direct bearing on the overall impact of Mumbai Diaries Season 2 springs to mind (and it has probably been asked before times without number): how necessary is the constant harping on "the undying spirit of Mumbai"? It only seems to cement narrative of hope manufactured to lull the citizenry - and the people charged with running the city - into complacency in the face repeated security and municipal crises.

It is probably time for Mumbaikars and shows like this one to demand a better deal from the authorities rather than buy the line that nothing can ever fluster the people of the city as they go about their lives. Seriously, which city, or for that matter which village in this country, ever grinds to a halt when calamity strikes? None ever has, does or will ever do. Living with reverses, be they man-made or natural, is our lot as Indians.

All said and done, Season 1 was a hard act to follow. Season 2 makes a fair fist of it and delivers an eminently watchable and broad-based drama that leaves the audience with much to mull over.