Opinion Reality check
T.S. Eliot once famously wrote,humankind/Cannot bear very much reality. Indian TV producers obviously dont read poetry. For,they dont just bear reality,they wallow in it like a sow does in a mud bath.
T.S. Eliot once famously wrote,humankind/Cannot bear very much reality. Indian TV producers obviously dont read poetry. For,they dont just bear reality,they wallow in it like a sow does in a mud bath.
Television is creaking under the unbearable heaviness of being. All TV is Reality TV. Its there on the news channels when theyre not chasing imaginary Chinese soldiers,Dawoods gangs or extra terrestrials (fewer nowadays); its there on the reality shows when theyre not acting like you suspect some contestants are on Big Boss; its there on the lifestyle shows,channels all those delectable dishes make you real hungry; and oh,its so very real when India beats Pakistan at cricket but a bad dream when the reverse happens.
Art imitates life and often,vice versa,but the two places you could safely hide from reality was at the movies or in tele-fiction else why call it fiction? What a safe haven the K serials were: no one ever met a Ramola bindi Sikand in real life or an ageless Ba.
Now films are going real on us: last Sunday saw A Wednesday and Mumbai Meri Jaan on movie channels. But you know youre really up against it,when Ekta Kapoor dramatises the plight of suicide farmers (Bairi Piya,Colors) and in her latest offering,follows the lives of three penniless sisters on the pavements of Mumbai (Bayttaab Dil Kee Tammana Hai,Sony. Say this for Ekta Kapoor,her spellings are completely fictional).
When we first encountered the Bayttaab girls,they were so exhausted,they simply stretched out alongside other pavement dwellers and fell asleep. Its another matter that everyone looked like they were sleeping on feather mattresses. When they woke up,they were hungry enough to do anything for food,why,even steal a lonely Rs 10 lying on the street. But virtue in the form of the oldest sister intervenes,triumphs and the money is returned to its rightful owner who,oh bittersweet irony,hands it over to a beggar. How real is that?
Kapoor once created trends; now shes following them. Reality is the H1N1 virus of TV and everyones catching it. On Colors,each serial is about humankinds encounters with reality. And reality in India is synonymous with suffering. Where K serials celebrated the lives and deceptions of hamara parivaar,current tele-fiction celebrates human indignities wherever it can find them. You dont have to look very far. On Colors,early evening,theres a forbidden caste love affair,followed by men being kidnapped to become unwilling husbands. Then there are the travails of the child bride of Ballika Vadhu and,that of her parents. Next,on Bairi Piya are the poor farmers. Big Boss gives us time to wipe our tears before they spring up again watching Uttaran where Ichha,the deprived girl,is up against the poor little rich girl. This is followed by Na Aana Is Desh Lado and the terrible practise of female foeticide.
All these themes,only too real,need to be portrayed,artistically. But the onslaught is as relentless as the pitiless reality it portrays in an increasingly melodramatic fashion. Even when Doordarshan was entertaining to educate us with social realism serials,it lightened the load with comedies and quizzes. Humankind cannot bear too much reality. T.S. Eliot said so.
Whats worse is that a serial such as Ladies Special (Sony) which sensitively portrayed the lives of middle class families in Mumbai,especially of its women,has been taken off the air. It was a quiet serial,but full of sound and fury and the violence of city life. It was about coping with Wordsworths still sad music of humanity in a cosmopolitan city like Mumbai where the living is anonymous but the suffering is personal. Ladies Special deserved better. It deserved to stay on the air.
shailaja.bajpai@expressindia.com
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