Aug 03, 2007 03:47 PM
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Once upon a time there was television. But there was only one channel. People sat glued to it till late into the night. They stopped going to watch movies. In fact there was hardly any good movie to watch. Television was the best diversion in everybody’s life, from the working class who slogged from morning to evening, to the students who bunked their tuition classes every Sunday morning, to the housewives who could not stop talking about the episodes of the previous night.
Cut to 2007. Television is still there. But there are over a hundred channels. People flick thru them at the speed of thought and never glance on any channel for more than a split second. They prefer spending 500 bucks in a multiplex than watching krying krap every weeknight. Students have found other reasons to bunk their Sunday morning tuition and husbands prefer spending the night at office than to go home and get drowned in millions of litres of artificial tears.
Television has come a long way. One of my earliest memories of watching television is of watching a serial called Kile Ka Rahasya. I was so scared of it that I used to hide in a remote corner of the adjoining room to escape from its haunting music. And on the other hand even the face of Rakesh Bedi used to make me laugh to eternity.
I was fortunate to live in a neighbourhood that was rather well off. Almost all households had a TV set. I don’t recall any instance of people visiting my home to watch TV. Some of my neighbors were better off and owned color TV sets which was obviously neighbor’s envy and owner’s pride.
But the quality of programming was miles ahead of what we see today. Let me sample some of the serials of the 1980s and early 90s –
Hum Log and Buniyaad
India’s first soap operas. Both had compelling stories though set in different eras. Hum Log was about a modern day lower middle class family and their struggles while Buniyaad was set in the time of partition and went before and beyond it. Both serials gave the TV industry actors like Alok Nath, Abhinav Chaturvedi, Sushma Seth and Divya Seth, Neena Gupta, SM Zaheer, Dileep Tahil, Kanwaljeet, Vijendra Ghatge and many others
Ramayan and Mahabharat
The parents of all mythologicals. Ramayan was funny in the way it was dramatized and Mahabharat corrected it to a large extent. Being epic stories, they both lasted close to 2 years and set benchmarks for future mythologicals, none of which measured up to their success.
Khandaan
Probably the first time a serial was made on big industrialists. Today’s serials have similar themes but then it was different. Actors like Mohan Bhandari and Jayant Kriplani made names for themselves with this serial.
Malgudi Days
Harry Potter fans must first watch(or read) Malgudi Days and then they will know what they are missing. Malgudi Days was the best thing you could ask for the kids in the 80s. Girish Karnad as Swami’s father and Master Manjunath as Swami became household names.
Gul Gulshan Gulfam
Perhaps one of the earliest example of a generation leap, this was a story of a Kashmiri family which went beyond its houseboats of Dal Lake and into a big city like Mumbai.
Wagle ki Duniya
Anjan Srivastav and Bharti Achrekar play a middle class couple in this situational comedy. Loosely based on RK Laxman’s Common Man, it is still recalled for its simplicity and exceptional handling of the situations.
There are plenty of other serials that I can list here. Fauji gave us Shah Rukh Khan while Mujrim Haazir Ho brought Utpal Dutt and Nutan to small screen. Each serial is a legend in itself.
Let me now talk about the modern day serials. Almost all of them start with K, even if it doesn’t match with their spellings. They leap generations at the drop of a hat and women inevitably turn into screen vamps. Slowly women get classified into two groups – good girls and bad girls. Obviously the bad girls torment the good girls and the good girls shed zillions of gallons of artificial tears.
It somehow reminds me of the Jitendra and Raj Babbar starrer drag movies of the 1980s. More often than not, they had an evil lady played by Lalita Pawar. Now Lalita Pawar was totally evil in those roles and today’s screen vamps cannot even compare to her evilness. However there is a big similarity in the Bollywood of the 1980s and the television of the 2000s – In the 1980s, the evil lady used to torment the good ladies(played by Rekha, Jayapradha, Reena Roy mostly) who shed bucketfuls of tears and today the saree clad vamps(Komolika, etc) torment the Tulsis, Parvatis, etc who again shed tears by the bucketfuls.
Then there is one more aspect of TV that does not go unnoticed – News. In the old days when Prannoy Roy made The World This Week, it was an instant success. People finally found a way of escaping Sansad Samachar and yet get their weekly dose of news packed into a half hour show. Today however is a different story. BREAKING NEWS rules the chart. And this breaking news could be as little as a weather forecast coming true!
Where does that leave the discerning viewer? So much to see but nothing to watch is a common grouse of many people. In stark contrast to the serials, Bollywood has lately started dishing out better movies in comparison to TV serials. People don’t mind spending a few bucks at the nearby multiplex and malls to get quality entertainment. Some have gone back to their reading habits and some prefer the radio over primetime rona dhona. Of course the Internet is another medium of getting away from this drag called television.
