What's On ?

Have you ever got a feeling that in spite of having a wardrobe full of clothes you have nothing to wear for a party? I get the same feeling everyday whenever I switch on the TV. I get around 80 odd channels, different languages, different themes, different programs but most of the time (or I can safely say almost all the time) I end up switching it off after flipping through the 80 channels twice or thrice. This flipping routine in itself is quite interesting. I start with some news channel, see the headlines or the important news till the hour and then move on to the next channel, which again will be a news channel (I have them grouped together), now this channel will be talking about world coming to an end/alien sightings/some extra terrestrial activity/some filmy controversy/some stuff directly ripped from YouTube, after trying to understand what is their point and every time being disappointed I change the channel in 30-40 seconds. This time I will be on some entertainment channel, again program on will be Saas- bahu soap/dance competition/singing competition/laughter competition(not stand up comedy because I think the real participants are the judges in these programs who try to win it from other judges by laughing out loudest). All these channels are either trying to tell us the stories we don’t want to hear or trying to make us dance or sing in front of weirdoes who have nothing better to do than judge others. In one of the reality shows I happened to watch because it was highly recommended, I saw two people with weird looks interviewing some young aspirants for a reality show. These two guys were trying to insult them in every possible manner and the participants were quite OK with it. It suddenly struck me that the desire to be on television, of having their “five minutes of fame” has reached to a level which can only be termed as mass hysteria. If people are ready to make a fool of themselves on national television, being ridiculed and their personality judged by people who don’t even look like normal human beings and that too after standing in long queue waiting for hours than that is not something normal. What is worse is that, people watch it and enjoy it too. This, I think is the television programming at its worst. I watch a few English sitcoms and at times enjoy them too. The question that comes to my mind is why can’t we make such memorable and humorous serials? I am a fan of Friends, How I met your mother and The big bang theory, but I can never make myself watch the Desi sitcoms, even if I did, I never developed a taste for them. The reason, I think is that director of most of the Hindi sitcoms believe that humor can be generated by action and not by words. All the Hindi sitcoms now a days seems to be based on this fact, and they try real hard to rope in weird looking characters or people with funny appearances to make the serial more hilarious but ironically in all of this comedy dies somewhere and worst still the character himself is never born. The English sitcoms are more memorable and funny because the characters in them are developed that way, you take Chandler or Joey of Friends or Barney Stinson all of them got developed gradually during the course of the serial and became “Legen…wait for it…dary” (in Barney’s words J ). But, this was not the case always with the Indian television, I still remember the old Doordarshan serials with their characters, they also developed in due course of time, because then people had time. In today’s TRP driven industry, serials and characters are living their life on the whims and fancies of some people, for whom the starting letter of the serial is more important than the story, the best example is the long named serial based on “Mahabharata”, the story line do resemble the great epic written thousands of years ago but the people in it does not even come close to representing the characters they are playing. When TV was invented, someone said that it will not be popular, as people will get bored of staring a box for long hours, well he was proven wrong, but Groucho Marx made a statement which I find has become very true, he said “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” I think for me also, it holds true.