Sapnay: Bringing dreams alive

THERE are dreamers and there are doers. Every family has them. Though more of the dreaming variety. Sapnay every Friday on DD Metro is about one such family.

The story revolves around Jagdish who has two sons Samarth and Siddharth and a daughter Devika. They are not dreamers in the conventional sense but just ordinary people who have dreams which they want to fulfil at any cost. Samarth is constantly in search of a get-rich-quick formula. Devika too has dreams of marrying a well- to-do handsome guy.

And that becomes the basis of a conflict. Father Jagdish is a very unhappy man as he is unable to realise his dream of bringing up kids his own way. He feels let down as they don’t subscribe to his old fashioned ideas. It is only his youngest son Siddharth who follows his father’s advice by subverting his own dreams. At this juncture the story takes a dramatic turn...

Sapnay, which starts with what looks like a tired and cliched formula suddenly peps up and turns out to be an above-average serial with some interesting twists and turns.

Operation black gold

Based on the popular Bengali novel Pichchil by Tathagata Mukhppadhyay, Kala Sona on Zee every Monday revolves is a complex tale of an honest petroleum engineer, Shantanu Ray who investigates the case of a missing oil field which had recently discovered. The government decides to give the contract to an overseas company for developing and producing oil from the field.

Strangely, when the production activities start, all oil from the field seems to have vanished. The oil field, that promised to propel India towards self-sufficiency is suddenly branded as barren.

Shantanu Ray who has been one of the engineers instrumental in discovering the field smells a rat. He is sure nothing could have gone wrong with the reservoir. He and his deputy, Sagar embark on a secret mission to find out what’s gone wrong.

And what they discover is the most sinister plot to cripple India’s oil industry and plunge the country into its deepest economic crisis of the millennium. A gripping serial which will keep you on the edge of your seats.

Rendezvous time again

She’s back. In her second innings on Star Plus and back with the all-new sequal series of Rendezvous with Simi Garewal.

The new series kicked off with a two-part show on the new darling of Bollywood Shekhar Kapur who talked about the making of his film Elizabeth. Alongwith his wife and without his beard, Kapoor waxed eloquent about Hollywood and himself.

However, the toast of Star TV and hostess Simi Garewal was the next episode on March 30. It was a talk with media baron Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Star TV. Shot in Los-Angeles, it is the first-its-kind interview where Murdoch talks about his personal life of Simi in great detail.

Some of the other names to be featured on the show are Pandit Ravi Shankar, Amitabh and Jaya Bachchan, Jayalalitha, Maharani Gayatri Devi and more. So don’t miss Simi Garewal in her second coming as she helps you peep into the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Stirring drama series

It’s a Hindi remake of the phenomenally successful Tamil Drama, Kai Alavu Manasu. And now it’s here on Sony Entertainment Television to recreate its magic. Chhoti si Aasha is story about the simple hopes and the little pleasures life offers. It’s gripping family drama laced with emotion and pathos.

The story revolves around Sharda whose husband Shekhar has an accidental fall from a building and is killed. The burden of bringing up the three children falls on Sharda. She recovers from her shock only to find that she has a serious cardiac problem which can only be cured by an extremely expensive surgery that she can’t afford, and moreover the odds of survival are few.

She takes the brave decision to give her children up for adoption. Separation from the children is very painful, but Sharda endures it. One day, while she is walking on the road absent-mindedly, she is hit by a car. Gurugena, who is responsible for the accident learns of her critical heart ailment and arranges for a cardiac surgery, which is successful and Sharda survives. The more Sharda gets to know Gurugena, the more she starts falling in love with him.

As time goes by, Sharda starts longing for her children. Will Gurugena help her get her children back? For the answer watch the serial on Sony every Friday’s at 9.30 p.m.

The nightingale talks

Over the past four years this low profile show has had some of the most powerful and famous people as its guests. Now Ru-Ba-Ru has scored another first of sorts by inviting Lata Mangeshkar for its 200th episode.

Host Rajiv Shukla may not exactly be Larry King but he does have the knack to draw people out of their shelves. Consider this. Lata Mangeshkar denied she had ever hampered sister Asha Bhosle’s career. And more surprisingly, for the first time in her life spoke publicly about the reasons why she said no to marriage.

An absorbing two-part series but a pity it didn’t get the publicity it rightfully deserved.

Building Hoover Dam

An army of men made it rise out of a rugged canyon and when it was completed in 1936, the Hoover Dam, Straddling river Colorado between Nevada and Arizona, USA, and was the largest dam on Earth.

There had never been anything quite like it. No dam, no matter how large, has ever been as famous. And no dam had ever impounded so much water – a 362 kilometre reservoir called Lake Mead. More than that, Hoover Dam changed the very face of the American southwest and made it possible for a desert to feed a nation.

This April, Discovery Channel traces the struggles and triumphs of the building of the Hoover Dam — the first dam of its kind and a model for all the world’s concrete dams to follow. Building Hoover Dam premieres on April 25 at 10 p.m. Watch this amazing saga of human spirit and enterprise at its best.

Hoover Dam: Harnessing natural resources.

—Mukesh Khosla

This feature was published on April 4, 1999