The Fall And Fall Of Indian Television

Indian tele serials have indeed come a long way. From the “Buniyaad” of Doordarshan to “Balika Vadhu”, the journey has been a mélange of emotions and reality, a game of TRPs and at the backdrop of all of it minting profits out of melodramatic stories. Nostalgia takes me to the time when as a kid I was this huge fan of Kavita Chowdhary who symbolised the empowered woman of the 80s in the serial “UDAAN”. Its signature tune, some dialogues and scenes have been etched in my memory since then. As a teenager while we had still not switched over to “cable connection”, I remember tapping my feet to the songs being shown on Chitrahaar every Wednesday and Rangoli every Sunday. Then the next series which I watched quite religiously though was Aarohan in which the protagonist played by Pallavi Joshi tries really hard to prove her mettle in the Indian Air force.

Though for the past two to three years, there’s been a deluge of serials on various channels dealing with social issues, I believe they project a befuddling picture of the real situation. Take for instance Balika Vadhu being aired on Colors – instead of highlighting the evils of child marriage and plight of young girls forced into early marriage the serial has gained popularity more for it’s characters like Anandi, Sukhna or Jagdish, the jewellery they flaunt whether it’s a marriage, a bereavement or may be just another normal day! The saas-bahu era may have ended and the next generation of teleserials is at its crescendo but they still miss to strike a cord somewhere. In our routine lives we mango people simply get up, go to work for study, enjoy with friends and keep on chasing our dreams. Where on Earth do we have the luxury of time to adapt that “sharyantkari” (plotting approach) OR act like hyper-emotive human beings who have a unique expression in store for every possible situation?

I find entertainment quotient totally missing in most of these serials. There are times when I’ve surfed from 1 to around 50 or 60 channels and had to remain contented with the news channels, the biz news ones or just to keep myself abreast with the recent “panchayat” right from “Yeh rishta kya kehlata hai” to “Do hanso ka joda” to “Pavitra Rishta……Oh god!

These names do give a sensation of feel-good factor, at the same time increasing my anxiety level all the very more. Why don’t we have something like Friends, the Oprah Winfrey Show, etc., all we’ve managed to do is aping international reality shows so we have Indian Idol on the lines of American Idol, Big Boss on the lines of Big Brother, with the entire format being copied. Where is our creativity? Does our creativity lie only in showing ego-hassles between judges, empathy inciting stories of contestants and their slogging to get that fifteen-minute fame on national television???

Not only do these serials need to evolve, our mindsets also need to come of age. Though the inherent psyche behind these shows seems to take you away from the cacophony of our monotonous lives yet that does not give them a right to propel us into a direction where our thought-process seems to be totally being sucked up by a virtual black-hole.