T.S. Eliot once famously wrote, “humankind/Cannot bear very much reality”. Indian TV producers obviously don’t read poetry. For, they don’t 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. It’s there on the news channels — when they’re not chasing imaginary Chinese soldiers, Dawood’s gangs or extra terrestrials (fewer nowadays); it’s there on the reality shows — when they’re not acting like you suspect some contestants are on Big Boss; it’s there on the lifestyle shows, channels — all those delectable dishes make you real hungry; and oh, it’s 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 you’re 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).

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