I was supposed to write about the 'double K' serials which we happen to see on TV... But seems like I don't really want to... They are really crappy :)
They really show how powerful and how good/bad fan-following be. Well the culture of soaps on TV, I guess started off with a serial called as Hum-Log. Well all the 'double K' serials are nothing but Hum-Log 2.0 :-)
As a young lad, when I had nothing to do after returning from school, I used to watch these serials. More so, they were aired by doordarhan, and those were the days when cable channel didn't penetrate into our house (thanks to my dad :-)). Well, Hum-Log really gave a clear picture of a middle class family, something which forms the maximum fraction of our population. But today these double-K serials really start with the middle class families, and then strech into the dreams of the middle class families. They show one person who can clear a debt of some thing like 100's of crores, and people in the middle class of our country actually finding resemblance with them... This really indicates that we have become avid dreamers :-)
Well, I really feel crappy writing about these serials. So lemme jus stop!
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3 comments:
I agree that most of the K serials are crappy but I feel it has helped households a lot ;-). Women are so fascinated by these serials that they don't have much time for gossips which is a source of trouble in every locality ;-)...Also, we are a developing nation, we face hard core reality everyday every moment so we don't need to see them again on TV ;-)...Americans live in a perfect world they need TV and Hollywood to become familiar with reality :-)
By the way I swear I haven't watched a single episode of these serials :-)
Well,yeah you are right that women wont really do much of gossip about the household next door, and rather indulge in discussions about these 'virtual' households that they see on the dumb-box! But these ladies are anyways not in the picture... Yes we are a developing nation, but at a time when people must innovate (and we definitely need innovation in our society, coz the world everywhere else is changing so fast that if we dont change, we wont survive), we are feeding their minds with crap like this. If media gives proper food for thought to everybody in this country, we would be a better place to live in no time.
Kapil, Don't ask me how I landed up here. I am perhaps the most jobless person on earth right now, thats why :)?
A very good topic you chose. Let me try to reemphasize and add a few points here. First of all, saying that these soaps keep women from gossips is like saying well, I have stopped going to the race course these days. The casino is just downstairs!! I mean, how bad was gossip and how good are these apparently miscontextual, overly sentimentalisitic soaps. I haven't been able to sit through a full episode myself, but there are very strong reasons. Its not that I don't like anything telecast on TV. I simply love "masala" -- basically anything that entertains. But the soaps that you talk about are far from enertaining, it only makes me wonder, how much one could distort simple household relationships.
True, "Humlog" and many other soaps on doordarshan, by and large focussed on the middle class, but these soaps don't focus on anything (well, I mean anything worthwhile for the viewers. No one can deny the fact that they sell!! So they surely focus on marketing well). There hasn't been any attempt to even make things look realistic. How many households have you seen with middle-aged, married women dressed up more elaborately, than any young girl perhaps going out on her first date? Conversations.. well I simply fail to fit it to any context. Every household holds itself together because of family attachments, and these attachments cause affections or sometimes tensions between members. This is what "holds a house" together. Now, sensationalizing these tensions, may be even some trivial complaints against each other,
as the whole purpose of a soap (ref. "saas-bahu"), is meaningless.
Well at the same time, I ask myself the question, how are they making so much money. Perhaps there aren't enough people who feel the same way as I do, or perhaps they do, but still they have nothing else to do but watch these serials. Whatever it is, it sws how well media in India is able to simply toy with people's tastes. I bet 100:1, if you start showing the once favourite Humog or even Nukkad, now, very few people would would watch it. Now they have the glamorous and neatly made serials, with a "K" icing on it.
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--Suddha
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