Sacred Games Season 2
is set in a world that is
as precarious as the
one we inhabitREVIEW
IF YOU ONLY SPEED-
WATCHED Sacred Games
season 1 and barely re-
member the story, don’t
leap straight into season
two: You’ll feel just as
adrift as gangster Ga-
nesh Gaitonde (Nawa-
zuddin Siddiqui) is in
the opening scene. This
season is a straight con-
tinuation of an intense,
multi-character story
that spans two timelines.
In the present day,
cop Sartaj Singh (Saif
Ali Khan) races against
time to prevent a nuclear
holocaust; meanwhile
we get flashbacks to
Gaitonde’s life as he is
drawn towards a ‘guru-ji’(Pankaj Tripathi) who
wants to usher in a new
satya yuga (age of truth).
Like The Comedian in
Watchmen, Gaitonde
slowly realizes he is a cog
in an unimaginably large
machine. Much of Sa-
cred Games’s emotional
impetus comes from his
personal journey as he
deals with guilt, para-
noia and hubris.
But there is also the
less author-backed—yet
equally compelling—
journey of Sartaj, dealing
with his own demons
and drawn to similar
addictions as Gaitonde
once was. The first cover
of Vikram Chandra’s vast
novel had depicted the
faces of these two men
blurring into each other;the show builds fasci-
nating parallels bet-
ween their arcs.
Season 2 is darkly
funny, the quality of
the writing and perfor-
mances is consistently
high, and even the
weaker episodes have a
couple of riveting scenes.
The ending may seem
‘open’, with an eye on a
possible season 3, but it
works if you see it as a
commentary on the pre-
carious state that India
and the world finds itself
in, through ecological
destruction as well as
majoritarian insistence
on ‘purity’. Armageddon
is looming, Sacred
Games reminds us;
can we pull ourselves
back in time?India,
To d a y
By Jai Arjun SinghReader’s Digest
Saif Ali Khan (far left),
Pankaj Tripathi and
Nawazuddin Siddiqui150 september 2019