Hostel Daze: Season 2
Hostel Daze is an Indian Hindi language comedy-drama streaming on television, and it’s a web series created by Saurabh Khanna and Abhishek Yadav and directed by Raghav Subbu.
Hostel Daze premiered on Amazon Prime on 13 December 2019.
Hostel Daze starts at the National Advanced Technical Training Institute, where the hostel manager (Sameer Saxena) gets a phone call from a parent complaining about their kid being bullied in a hostel. A swing of surprise by confused-looking students, we hear him say, “Ma’am, apka beta professor hai . Relax .” Where viewers of Amazon Prime Video’s latest comedy-drama offering hostel daze will come to realize that it’s the most comedy show. Over the course of the episode series, it is that life at this engineering college is not easy, for anyone
As Hostel Daze dives starts we are introduced with Jatin aka Jhantoo (Nikhil Vijay), ex-hostel squatter and current student, who emerges as the proprietor of a campus empire of cigarettes, and forgery while episode two (‘Proving Identity’) sees Bansal set up an online platform where he uploads videos of the lectures held in college, even as students they scramble to find their footing in clubs.
As the show comes to its finale (End of Sem), Jhantoo, Pandey, and Jaat prove enough to solve problems, even being human enough to fail, while Bansal and fellow topper Ravi Teja stand on the opposite thinking of achieving O grades. Hostel Daze rocked away from the tropes of campus drama in this respect, setting up a field for a group of students to own their quirky strengths as the show progresses musicians and environmentalists alike find their firm footing.
The series loses TVF’s street cred that was developed with an early release through its portrayals of issues such as ragging, toxic masculinity, and gender dynamics at college. As the roommates get settled into their hostel life, their starting is no longer a memory from the past, making regular occurrences with ragging being shown even in episodes (‘F.O.S.L.A’, ‘GPL’) where it’s not the main theme.
There’s a scene in episode 3 (‘F.O.S.L.A’), where a male student describes Akansha like so: “Akansha kaun – woh Badey…vicharon wali ” This dialogue is being repeated several times in the web series until the last episode comes, and it is enough to make anyone who had previously missed out on delicacy
While one female character is treated as the “prized catch” at college we are soon introduced to the only other female character with dialogue, Nabomita (Ayushi Gupta), who is led by heart-eyes and a lot of jealousy to provide Pandey with a shoulder to cry on.
There is a scene where a guy enters the canteen screaming, “Akansha meri hai, sirf meri. 549 rupey ki Ferrero Rocher di hai maine usse .
The series could make anyone who has ever lived in a hostel hark back about the good old days, except they try to pass off toxic masculinity as the bedrock of the ultimate college experience, presenting and it defines as the sole key to survival in male hostel culture. For men, these scenes will definitely regret. For women, they evoke trauma.
The show tries to show the realities of the lives of engineering students in India but ultimately normalizes what can’t be finished as absurd because abuse never was.
Every episode is narrated by an adult who is operating within the college and hostel universe — the custodian, security guard, chemistry professor, canteen manager, xerox shop owner — their observations further serve to condone the toxic culture through the underbite of humor.
Instead of confronting the very real issues that students are faced with, Hostel Daze minimizes them to the point of tradition, normalization, and acceptance. And in its telling of the truth lies an endorsement that feels both endemic and dangerous.
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To watch this Series visit: Amazon Prime.