India has a new trend, Hindi soap operas. Absolutely the trashiest muck on TV anywhere in the world. And so many are hooked on to their daily spewing of absurd dung that talent-less actors find themselves elevated to cult status overnight. The stories are outrageous, the direction is pathetic and the cinematography redefines shooting a gaudy vomit in digital video.
We have on-screen characters who’ve had kids and their kids have had kids and so on till the calculated age of the first character is above three hundred! And yet the shows go on like everything is perfectly ‘Indian’ and the whole joint family goes through the rigors of daily life thrust upon them by incompetent writers. Melodrama would not even begin to describe what goes on in these soaps every day. Its like every possible combination of the worst of humanity is written down on chits of paper and a handful are grabbed out of a hat and thrown up. Everything that lands is picked up and written into the script – daily.
People talk about the lives of characters as if they were actual people living next door and are ever willing to discuss their own points of views on what a character should have done in a particular situation. It is destroying the young and impressionable minds throughout the country. Endless debates have raged and countless people have voiced their anger at their ways of life being ridiculed to such impossible extremes. But the makers are not listening; all they hear is the jingle of the cash-box connected to their ratings. The more ludicrous their offering, the more gullible minds they seem to influence.
Till now I had tuned out those channels from our TV. The whole disgusting set of them. With a hundred and nine channels to choose from, I had refused my family from ever tuning into them. It wasn’t censorship, it was just to prevent them from acquiring such a pathetic (and incorrect) picture of humanity. I am not a fan of TV. Sometimes days go by without my watching a single program. I am not against TV, I just think that the few hours we manage to scrape off of our daily lives for family should be better spent.
But these days my in-laws are staying with us. They have recently shifted from Pune and are in the process of repairing and renovating their house which had been locked up for three years. Since their house is very close to ours, its easier for them to stay here and get the work done. And they are hooked on these soaps. From 8:30 in the evening to 11:00 at night, they sit glued to the tube waiting for the next installment of trash. They are actually very nice people and I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, many times to change their views but they just have to know what happens next. Whose daughter-in-law ran away with which good-for-nothing scoundrel and whose wife is sleeping with whose husband while plotting to kill the other one and take over the empire which would shame Bill Gates’ wealth.
And since I can’t change them, I’ve decided, in my own cowardly way, to come home from office after their daily soaps are over. Its so much quieter there with 20 hp compressors and two ton geared flywheels running on the press floor. Even the floor boys and the mechanics screaming at each other over the din of the presses is soothing compared to these soaps at home.
Leave a Reply