What is it about marriage that brings out the Indian in us? Why is it that almost without exception, TV entertainment, when it is not daring us, scaring us or baring our innermost secrets, runs in circles around the holy fires of matrimony? Is it, as Frank Sinatra once famously sang, about “love and marriage” (go together like a horse and carriage) or is it the primordial fear of extinction that compels us to continually ensure our future through new generations (which follow the horse and carriage!).

Consider: there’s a show called Perfect Bride (how typical that it’s the bride who must be ‘perfect’), there’s Rahul Mahajan searching for the perfect bride on Swayamvar (coming soon), there’s Pati Patni aur Woh (NDTV Imagine) who appeared on TV yesterday and are confronting said future generation in the form of a baby, and there’s the new Colors serial Bairi Piya. Here, amidst the ruins of a harvest, the indebtedness of impoverished farmers, the villainy of the moneylender ‘maalik’, Ekta Kapoor has proposed marriage, just as she had in countless earlier soaps.

She’s joined a long line of baraatis: marriage parties attend every soap, every week. But Kapoor’s decision to introduce an engagement and plans for a marriage in the first few episodes of her latest serial, that too one which explores the grim lives of ‘suicide farmers’, testifies to the centrifugal force of weddings as TV spectacle and marriages as plot propeller of universal appeal.

Perhaps Kapoor needed familiar trappings as she embarks on a journey into the unknown. With Bandini (NDTV Imagine), she had already ventured into rural India but she had clung to Ronit Roy for comfort. Besides, most of the action occurs within the comfort zone of a palatial mansion. Now, she’s out in the open with green crops invaded by locusts (or other flying insects), alongside heartbroken farmers who torch their land to save the neighbouring village’s harvest. She’s inside a kachcha dwelling where the feast consists of a glass of water as sister asks sister to imagine it’s an egg. She’s beside the farmers pleading with the maalik to give them time to repay him and he says fine then, give me your daughters instead.

... contd.