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‘You came into my life as a gift’: the extraordinary cross border love story of Captain Ri, Jeong-hyoek and Yoon, Se-ri

In this second part of my love for K-drama series I focus entirely on one serial, my favourite, Crash landing on you (2019). So if you bear with me I will take you through a tale of romance, love, friendships across borders which cannot end on a note of fulfilment in ‘serial’ time. Borders, says Geetanjali Shree in her tome Tombs of Sand, should be about where people meet but instead the borders created in the 20 th  century are about partitioning peoples’ lives and keeping them apart. And so it is with North and South Korea, which is where the protagonists in this story live, separated in their lifetime.   Crash landing is in 16 episodes, each 90 minutes, very long, and yet it had record viewership in Korea beside being one of the highest revenue earners for tv serials. It continues to fascinate audiences across the world in every age group in my experience since both I and a young 31-year-old friend loved it. Replete with romance, adventure, fun and tragedy it is a highly en...
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Love of K-Drama (Part 1)

Cultural politics and my snobbish self I have been meaning to write this blog for some time now but kept postponing the moment. And why the hesitation? Because it was not on Hang Kang’s novels or Korean cinema but about K-Drama. I realized that the hesitation was me, my persona and what I considered myself to be. I am an avid reader, like seeing good films and reading about films, a fan of theatre and opera as also have a not so sophisticated interest in the celebrity lives of the stars (acquired during Corona lockdowns when our lives went online). In short I  am interested in all sorts of cultural offerings from across the world. All this seems okay but K-drama? It wasn’t a serious genre surely! What I am trying to say is that the snobbery surrounding my persona as a serious, elderly person seemed to be in jeopardy by becoming a fan of K-drama.    And then I was introduced to a curated list of K-drama by a friend from India. My fascination grew as I began watching t...
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