House of secrets burari professional#

The investigators apparently found 11 dairies from the home, each detailing the situation. Based on the diary entries, the police suspected it to be a case of a ritual gone wrong. But all of them reek of tokenism and nothing more.What was initially suspected to be a murder turned out to be a case of ‘mass suicide’. The docu-series makes the requisite nods - to mental health, to the ‘secrecy’ aspect of Indian families, and deep hold of superstition and it also vilifies the media. It doesn’t ask the questions - why do we automatically accept and obey an order just because it’s stamped with a religious lens? Or that why we as a society are instinctually driven to hide the said ‘abnormalities’ in our households? It’s the same instinct that makes us hide a divorced sibling, especially if it’s a woman, or a relative who is suffering from a mental health disorder. It only narrates the how and why, but it doesn’t take the narrative further. The docu-series falls into the same trap. The tragedy should have heralded questions and discussions surrounding the hidden dysfunctionality of ‘seemingly, normal families’. One cannot just dismiss the tragedy by saying that ‘Lalit was mentally disturbed’ or some variation of the theme. But one must not forget the deep patriarchal hold that he had on the family, which he further strengthened and legitimised by the invocation of a religious angle. There are nods to mental health and how Lalit’s ‘psychosis’ led to this tragedy.

House of secrets burari professional#

They are in the very heart of it - are upwardly mobile with a social media presence and they rehearse for a wedding sangeet with a professional choreographer in tow. And this is not a family who is at the fringes of society. Imagine the hold that Lalit had on the family that even the youngest child in the family, who was 15, never felt the need to confide in anyone that his father was frequently ‘possessed’.

A family friend reflects, “Koi bachcha hi bata deta (if only a child of the family had shared this with us)’’. Friends and neighbours of the family, who have been extensively interviewed in the due course of the docu-series, had no knowledge of these religious angles and the ‘family dynamics’ of the Chundawats. It’s according to that word of law that the family attempted a ‘badd puja’ - a religious ceremony invoking a banyan tree, that led to the death of the entire family. Those words became the word of law for the Chundawat family, so much so that no one dared to question the ‘messenger’. Hand-written notes in 11 diaries and notebooks revealed that Lalit used to be ‘possessed by the spirit’ of his dead father, and during the said ‘possession’ he would impart certain dos and don’ts for his family. But where it fails is raising the appropriate questions, especially in the aftermath of the big reveal. The docu-series is well-executed and well made, and scores on the technical aspects of storytelling. Even though most of us know that the youngest son of the family, Lalit, was the one who initiated the mass suicide attempt, the actual big reveal gives one goosebumps.

From incorporating the many conspiracy theories that floated around the case at that point, to revealing the actual truth, the docu-series unravels like a work of fiction, backed by a well-written screenplay. There is a scary build-up, and even though the docu-series never once shows actual footage or images of the dead family, the impact is quite chilling nonetheless.

With the use of archival media footage, some recreated sequences and testimonies by experts, Yadav makes us feel that we were there in the bylanes of Burari.