: Put out a Missing Persons signpost on your television screens: where is the other half of India? Every which way you look, smart, attractive, robust, energetic, slim — young — people glow back at you in tight skin, tighter tops and tightest bottoms! Their teeth haven’t seen yellow, their hair a strand of white (grey maybe), their flesh the first letdown. They’re all so beautiful and youthful. That and pale-skinned, Hindu upper crust, educated, with high, higher and highest standards of living. Fortunately, there are more women per millimetre of the TV screen than men.
The rest of India, ageing, ailing, poor, illiterate, class-ridden, divided by caste and religion, you’ll discover on the news channels as victims of violence or any of the above. How about TV reservations for non-Hindus, the fat, the ugly(?) and unfortunate above 40?
These Mandalised thoughts come of watching too much television, not to mention the launch of a high flyin’ channel, NDTV Good Times. Let’s just go with the age/looks factor. Star World, this week, premieres Brother & Sisters, starring Sally Field and Calista Ally McBeal Flockhart. Calista is still skin and bones, but Sally has bags’n’sags in all the right places for her 60 years. There’s Alec Baldwin, 49, lead actor of 30 Rock looking every bit middle-aged with the appropriate bulging middle. Star Trek maybe over for William Shatner, 76, but he has embarked on an Emmy award winning role as a top-notch, vulgar and often drunk defense lawyer with a bloated ego and body in Boston Legal. Candice Bergen, 60, is his adversarial colleague with a face that retains the beauty of younger days, wrinkled and puffy. BBC Entertainment (for DTH subscribers) sitcoms star people well over 40 years and 70 kilos. Silent Witness has the lead character, female and if a day, 55 — we mean the actress and the character. Hollywood actress Glenn Close, 60, is currently starring in a new American legal show, called Damages. Basically, actors with chins doubled, trebled or lined like school notebooks are highly visible (never mind that it maybe in the twilight of their Hollywood careers).
Of course whites predominate but there are darker shades too, and the very typical middle class, professional and householders: Everybody Loves Raymond, doesn’t appear to possess a bread-winner, although they’re invariably cooking something up in the kitchen. English soaps like Coronation Street or Eastenders have always been...
Shailaja Bajpai
