Navneet Nishan and Benjamin Gilani in Tara.

Tara (Zee), that never-ending serial which was reportedly, given marching orders recently, is only going off the air for a short while. It's just taking a break (if you please) and promises to be back in a better, flashier form six months from now.

Raman Kumar, who launched his company Tracinema with this serial, says, "Tara is not ending we're just taking it off the air to diffuse the feeling of stagnancy." There is another angle to it: in terms of advertising, the months of August and September are better.

"What actually happened with Tara was that when it was shifted from 9 pm to 10.30 pm, we lost quite a big chunk of our viewers. But one can't blame the channel as this sort of thing is done all over the world to popularise different time slots. Since Tara had a large viewership, the channel was quite justified in doing so," adds Kumar.

But wasn't there some talk of two more of his five serials going off Zee? "Raahat has just been shifted to the afternoon slot, that's why people think it's been taken off air. Only Shatranj is to wind up in June, but that's because our contract expires then," explains Kumar.

Chandraprakash Dwivedi, head of programming at Zee, feels that viewers should get a break from long-running serials, which will also help the creative team to infuse some fresh ideas into the story. "We've decided to give the viewers a break. In fact, I'd strongly recommend this sort of thing where long-running soaps are given an intermission," he adds.

Talking of freshness, hadn't the advent of a new, young Tara brought in a sea breeze? "No, unfortunately it didn't seem to work as well as we thought it would. So I thought that, maybe, people need a break from it," states Dwivedi.

Dwivedi denies this is just a soft way of getting rid of a serial without treading on any toes "We'll bring it back on air 6 or 8 months later if they can come up with something new". Aha.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.