Sight & Sound
Real-life drama more watchable
Amita Malik

Goodbye, all you bahus and saas; pipe down Jassi and Simran.
There are some real-life serials which are knocking you off the screen.

The Shankaracharya serial, which has run into a roaring third week, promises to pick up more TRPs as it goes along. Then there is the Ambani saga; it has all the ingredients of a blockbuster, that old formula of brother fighting brother. And, Kolkata had got quite worked up about the suspension of the Prince of Cal-koota, as Geoffrey Boycott has christened him. It had a happy ending after running for about a month.

The Uma Bharati serial has had fewer ups and downs and fewer twists than Zaheera and Seetalvad, which some see as the eternal fight between good and evil. And the two-part cricket serial between India and South Africa has recovered from the boring Nagpur episode and Eden Garden seems to have pepped up Virendra Sehwag even more than his honeymoon in Switzerland.

Compared with all this, even the longest running serial of all, the Pakistan-India talks seemed routine, if not boring. The blood bath with which Bush and company are bringing democracy to Iraq continues its gory way. But in some ways more dismaying for Indians was a CRPF jawan who had a mental break-down and killed his commanding officer as well as six of his colleagues. The footage of the bodies of jawans being carried away was harrowing. But what puzzled me was the big boss of the CRPF saying the killer jawan could not have been suffering from stress because he had been in the force for only one year. What sort of logic is that? One can feel stress from the very first day, if one is a misfit in any job or situation. And Kashmir could have been a very stressful posting.

There have been many bizarre moves in the name of morality by those who decide what’s good for listeners and viewers. Remember Sushma Swaraj making a fuss over a skirt flying up with the breeze. Nowhere as sexy as the famous flying skirt of Marilyn Monroe, but it was taken off. Then the AIR monitoring unit, set up initially by the British to monitor enemy propaganda during World War II, was wisely retained by the Government of independent India to monitor propaganda by hostile countries. It was doing a good and serious job until the BJP government asked it to monitor pornographic material on Indian (and foreign) channels. What a waste of time and public money.

And now this government has made an even more bizarre decision which would be funny if it were not so silly. It has asked the Intelligence Bureau, no less, to do audience research on what programmes the Kashmiri listeners and viewers would like to get from Prasar Bharati. I wonder how exactly they will do this. Will they barge into Kashmiri homes to find out what they are watching. I would immediately protest if I were a Kashmiri.

The Intelligence Bureau, anyway, is no judge of culture and the arts, let alone the media. How do they come into it? Surely media people and non-political and non-bureaucratic people trained in audience research and those familiar with Kashmiri culture and aspirations would be better fitted to carry out this valuable task.

In Kashmir, Pakistan TV has been cutting circles round Doordarshan, not least of all due to poor technical transmissions. And in the North-East, where English and western music score over Hindi and filmi geet, AIR and DD have taken second place to Thailand and China. These countries give listeners and viewers foreign films with original dialogue and the best of western classical and pop music. DD is nowhere in the picture. Give it a thought, I&B Ministry. You cannot win audience through intelligence bureaus.

This feature was published on December 4, 2004