#365DaysOfWriting – Day Eighteen
Indian soaps tick me off.
My grandmother right now is watching some soap opera called ‘दहलीज़’ (Dahleez) on Star Plus.
It’s trying too hard to be modern, but it suffers from the same problems most of these Indian soaps do – stereotypes, unnecessary long pauses, cliched dialogue, over-dramatisation, predictable ‘cliffhangers’ and eventually, the same old ‘love story with a big fat Indian wedding’. There’s some bomb-defusing story in the middle of it all – it has the potential to be interesting but it’ll eventually boil down to that wedding.
Every serial, including and especially ससुराल सिमर का (Sasural Simar Ka) has the same old tired formula.
And to keep the viewers interest, they blatantly copy twists/situations/music from English serials and movies to make them look better than they are. The aforementioned serial used Game of Thrones’ Hall of Faces to promote one of its episodes. Crime Patrol on Sony blatantly rips off music from The Dark Knight and Inception to dramatise ‘real life situations’.
Where did Indian television go wrong? It wasn’t always this bad.
Many years ago, there used to be a serial called साँस (Saans). It told the story of a housewife, Priya (played by Neena Gupta), who seems to have the perfect, happy family life with her husband Gautam (Kanwaljit Singh), and their two kids, Akul and Mithi. One day, the couple befriend Manisha (Kavita Kapoor), and all hell breaks loose. She falls in love with Gautam and ends up having an affair with him. The entire serial revolves around how Priya tries to keep her family from breaking completely. And how she wins her husband back.
Sound stereotypical to you? Surprisingly, it wasn’t. It was a bold step for Indian TV at that time to touch upon the sensitive topic of infidelity. It was well-directed, wonderfully written, and every character on the show had a purpose. Even a 12-year-old me, interested in other things like Batman and He-Man, was hooked to this show. And even with its mature content, it was light enough for me to get the gist of what was going on. It was THAT brilliant.
Of course, there have always been great shows in the history of Indian TV, even as recently as Sarabhai v/s Sarabhai (which sadly ended in 2006), but Saans will always stay with me because it had a great impact on me when I was so young.
The big ‘turnaround’ (I call it downfall) of Indian TV came with Ekta Kapoor’s excessively stylised, regressive (it may have started well but ended up being regressive and backward) series of ‘K’ serials. They form the basis of almost every new show we see on TV these days. Even anything different that they try these days is almost snuffed out.
Yashraj had a television division, and they introduced a serial like Powder – a good ‘inspiration’ of The Wire from the USA – but it barely lasted one season.
Can Indian TV return to its glory days? Hard to say, because as you know, what people demand is what they get. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for another Saans to blow us away.
