The idiot box is likely to remain so as long as the daily family sob sagas exist.
Cut to the producer who is high on the K factor. She claims her serials depict the daily lives of the middle class and deal with middle class values; (umm..read middle class as in huge gaudy bungalows, murders, and unthinkable scandals).
Switch to any of the Hindi television channels (the regional channels are not far behind) at prime time. Audiences gets a dose of:
Spiteful mothers-in-law (even 4 generations of them).
Tulsi leaves, purity (pavitra), 104 yr old grandmother.
Adarsh (bosom heaving) decked up bahus with 3 kgs of sindoor trying to keep in with the sanskar of the parivaar (never mind the strappy fashionable blouses).
Vamp aunts, bhabis and cousins – supposedly visiting but stay on for a couple of years to make life hell for the seeda-saada types.
Same vamps standing behind doors/windows eves dropping.
Gullible grandparents who get tricked by scheming bahus or nieces time and again (guess they’ll never learn-that too in old age).
Convenient remarriages each time a bahu is widowed.
Bigamy – one wife in jail one wife at home and the next one…?
Accidents-plastic surgery; enter brand new face and character.
New borns getting stolen, adoption.
Murders and scandals.
30 minutes of ‘ram nam satya hai’ etc etc etc…(dead person emerges in the next episode; a la after 30 years from ‘ganga ke kinare’ – matted hair, torn saree and shoddily made up wrinkles).
Bucket and buckets of (crocodile?) tears.
Spineless husbands.
Whew….I can go on!
Will Indian television ever grow up? Even serials that start on a sensible note land up going the K way…
Idiot Box? Definitely!
