The Indian girl in charge of customer service in the American version of The Office was played by the hilarious, multi-talented Mindy Kaling. The position of the drama queen is now filled by Mallika Dua in the Hindi remake of the show available on Hotstar.
One can’t help but draw comparisons between the counterparts. And though there is a broad similarity between the two, Dua paints her character in various hues. Talking about what encouraged her to take up the role, she says, “I am playing Kitty Kataria, Indian adaptation of Kelly Kapoor which was essayed the very talented Mindy Kaling who has also written the original script of The Office. I was going to play Mindy’s character so there was no reason for me to say no. I was driven towards this character primarily because it’s an iconic character and another reason is that big brands like Hotstar, BBC and Applause have come together for this show. I didn’t watch the original show as I did not want it to affect my portrayal of the character, so I had no opinion of it. I feel an actor should just play the character without any bias or judgement and that’s exactly what I did,” says she. While the other characters base their performance on their American parallels, Dua claims to dance to her own tune, of course implementing certain traits of the daft Kelly Kapoor.
And though she is glad that she didn’t watch the show, she thinks that even if she had watched it, she wouldn’t compare it with the Hindi remake. “An adaptation comes with certain amount of limitations and when you are adapting a global iconic show, it comes with a certain set of mandates. You can’t just go anywhere you want with the script,” she says.
Since the office is based out of a small town in all the versions, here it is set up in Faridabad — a city in Haryana located just on the border of Delhi. The employees also add a local flavour to the whole show. “Talking about how she has ‘Faridabised’ her character, Dua says, “Bringing alive the essence of any type of Delhiite is always a fun experience for me. I never consciously made any effort to make Kitty sound more from Faridabad. She is that character who does not really care about what people think of her. Not in a rebellious way, but she is just lost in her own lovely dream world,” adding, “In this season, you will witness some unexpected relationship twists, romances and of course lots of randomness and madness.”
The other characters include Mukul Chaddha as Regional Manager Jagdeep Chadda (based on Michael Scott), Gopal Dutt as assistant to the regional manager T P Mishra, (based on Dwight Schrute), Sayandeep Sengupta as salesman Amit Sharma (based on Jim Halpert), Samridhi Dewan as the receptionist Pammi Goel (based on Pam Beesly), Abhinav Sharma as the intern Sapan Gill (based on Ryan Howard), Preeti Kochar as saleswoman Sarla Bansal (based on Phyllis Lapin) and Sunil Jetley as salesman Saleem (based on Stanley Hudson). The accounting department has Priyanka Setia as Anjali, Gavin N Methalaka as Kutti and Chien Ho Liao as Rinchin (based on Angela Martin, Kevin Malone and Oscar Martinez).
Ask her if she gets along with her ‘office colleagues’, and she says, “Very well! I came in much later and I did not spend as much time on set as they did, but each time I was on set, it was a riot. I’ve had a great time working on the show, we couldn’t stop laughing during scenes because they were so funny,”
But among all her fellow workers, the rather amusing T P Mishra is her favourite. “He is foolish and idealistic at the same time. I love such kind of people. I like other characters as well, but TP is my favourite. More than an individual character, I love the banter that goes on between the colleagues in the office,” says Dua.
“I love what Amit and TP have, I love how Amit and Pammi understand each other. Of course, Chaddha and Madhukar are extremely funny when they are together. In the season 2, half of the humour does not come from what Kitty says, but from how Sapan reacts to her quirks.,” she adds. In the American version, Kelly Kapoor and Ryan Howard have an on-again-off-again romantic relationship.
It is with this show that the mockumentary genre has been introduced to Hindi audiences. To be a successful mock-documentary, the way actors perform and the way the project is shot has to be as natural as possible. Sharing her take on the genre, Dua says, “Personally, I love it. They are totally ready for it as we are a country that loves reality TV shows but this is of course not the same, this is a fiction show. People in India really enjoy knowing what is going on in somebody else’s head and in shows like this, you get to see that. I love the genre, I think it’s amazing as half of the comedy comes from this. Camera moves like the way human eyes sees, the reactions look very natural.”
