Palash Vaswani kickstarted his career as an associate director with the web series Permanent Roommates season 2 (2016). He also directed five hugely popular web series, Zeroes (2018), Awkward Conversations with Parents (2018), Cheesecake (2019), Gullak season 2 (2021) and the current superhit Gullak season 3 (2022). The Free Press Journal caught up with him for an exclusive chat.
Stories like Gullak are rooted and somewhere losing their importance in storytelling. When asked what pushed him to tell a story like this, Palash shares, “It comes from the personal agenda or greed. I am from a small town and I don’t think there’s a correct representation of the small town being shown on screen these days. It is very caricaturish and not the real representation of small. People aren’t dumb or shoot all the time. Gullak is a potent ground where I could show much deeper stuff. In Gullak, we showed issues like feminism but in a light way.”
He adds, “I am not denying that fathers are not patriarchal but he also makes tea and we have shown the father and the boys making tea several times. Time has changed.”
Palash recently won awards for the show. Sharing further on having social acceptance, he tells, “I have grown up watching award shows but to receive one for telling your story is fulfilling. One has to be true to the intent and craft. I feel that I told a story which people wanted to see for the longest time. Comedy hasn’t been explored yet and Gullak had the comical narrative in the most simplified way.”
In the current day and time where OTT has changed the ballgame for the creative world. When probed further if he feels OTT as a saving grace for telling his stories, he reveals, “OTT has the power of telling a story about a secondary character for half an hour and coming back to the core characters. While growing up, I was a sucker of good shows but I had to download English shows since back then, we didn’t have good shows in making. OTT has raised the bar for Indian storytelling.”
