Thinkistan review: Naveen Kasturia and Shravan Reddy’s show introduces us to the complexities of advertising in a light-hearted manner

A light-hearted office drama set in the mid 90’s, MX Player original series Thinkistan is a deep dive into the world of advertising, and manages to give you an insight of what it includes. Though the show takes its highlight point of the conflict between the Hindi and the English writer very loosely, there are many things to look for. Starring web space charmers Naveen Kasturia and Shravan Reddy, the show gears up in the second half. Getting to watch Mandira Bedi on screen though is bliss.

What Thinkistan is about: Set in the mid 90’s, Thinkistan is a show that takes place inside a top advertising agency named MTMC. It is about two writers, a Hindi guy from Bhopal, Amit (Naveen), and the other is an English writer from Mumbai, Hema (Shravan), who has left his engineering job to pursue his passion. The show talks about the discrimination that takes place between a English copy-writer and a Hindi copy-writer just because the latter comes from a vernacular medium. Side-by-side, it  deals with their parallel lives, challenges at the office and how the Hindi writer grapples with the situation.  As the tagline says, Idea Jiska, India Uska, the show religiously follows it and it adds perfectly to the detailing.

Yay: Not that we haven’t seen office dramas, but Thinkistan gives you an unexplored perspective (on screen) of a profession. How ideas are formed, how advertisements are made to play with your mind… and it isn’t the smooth ride we presume it to be. All aspects are included, giving you a detailed journey through it.
explored well is also the chemistry between the two leads. The bond between Amit and Hema grows with each episode, and you are with them on their journey of friendship. But somewhere in the course of show, the makers address the problems that the advertising world needs to address, the colour-obsession being a prominent one. The show seems to forget the main conflict of the ups and downs between the writer.

Nay: The art and costume departments have let down the series. No one, literally no one, is dressed appropriate to the time frame it is set in. The clothes and the office space are too fancy to belong to the 90’s. Some issues look out of place, like a homosexual person excepting his sexuality to be accepted so openly in the 90’s is difficult to digest.
We do not get to see an end product. It is an advertising agency and we are just introduced to ideas, but never to the end product, the department in which the last office series Made In Heaven had excelled in.
Layering of the characters is the first thing expected in a long-format execution, but writer-director Padmakumar Narasimhamurthy has not worked much in that department.

CineBlitz Verdict: Thinkistan is a light-hearted show that takes us into a part of a world we may not be familiar with. Watch it if you are in a mood to watch a breezy show and don’t want to get out. 11 episodes, almost half-an-hour each make for a decent watch, and still wouldn’t be much time wasted..