It was a beautiful morning with radiant sunshine and I was having my favourite breakfast of puttu and kadala curry with my parents. “How delicious”, I told Amma and tried to spread the glitter my heart and soul were relishing but Amma was rather unusual and moody that day. I held her arms and asked her, “Amma… are you unwell?”. What she told me was just smacking on me.
She shared with me her experience of watching a TV serial last night where the children desert the parents and plan to put them up in an old age home. She had connected with it personally and put across something I will never forget all my life – “ I feared that will happen to me one day “. She is blessed with all the children spending time every day with her, just cracked this because of the negative vibe emanated from a Television serial.
Why do I begin my article with this – Because we emerge from a time span of life, where we are always enslaved to visual perceptions and convictions. The question I was left with – what do the television contents impart and what is it – the viewer gets connected to from the virtual mendacity to the real existence. No denying the fact that children desert their parents and the parents suffer. They do. But the portrayal of it affecting a mother with a negative vibe and not giving her a sense of fulfilment that she is blessed to have loving children is the trouble.
Is portraying the dark sides of life branded to be bane? For sure, NO. But the puffing of the air into reality so that it bloats noxiously is the pivotal issue of such tumultuous results. The second world concept is so popular in the modern-day world – google” second world “and enter a world where you step into the delusion that satiates your yearnings. At a juncture, you sing in different tunes where the delusional world becomes the real.
Most Indian women who stay at home watch serials from morning to night and their entire psyche believes that they live and breathe there – 24/7. The making means much, instead of continuous two shots and close-ups with reactions, the shot divisions basically can be filmy by which we possibly cut off the amateurish impact. Staging the characters in a semi-circle axis or as if standing in a queue in ration shops, the makers of serials exhibit their novice standards of filmmaking. The content means more. The dearth of emotional vacuum every modern mind suffers through is never given an eye. Trying to gratify the TRP yardsticks, unrealistic conflicts and malodorous drama are given undue importance. The aftermath and the impact it creates in the human psyche is never dialogued upon or even if it’s the dialogue about, it’s done just with the tongue in the cheeks.
Always to see a mother-in-law who is suspicious of her daughter in law and a daughter in law to get rid of the mothers-in-law have an undaunted relatable bump in the relationship quotient of familial bondings. And this will happen and happen again – because these serials go on and on for perpetuity – in which the sub-characters are given much more importance – so that the lustre of the main plot loses its grip. Storytelling with artificial boosters is the special menu of the day ( inclusive of maha episodes ) – and these will never inject stamina to the serial in any way.
Never to contemplate the malignant outcome, the television content hypes on creating tension in the storyline and the screenplay motif is hence infected with hate and jealousy. The second wife concept as I see in my tenure seems to be a jumping jack concept to bring back the TRP rating if it has a drastic fall. I will never say that these issues don’t exist. But these are not just the issues that prevail. There are very many stories of success, stories that are very new to the content world, that is still unexplored.
Reinventing content is a fabulous alternative to redesign this nadir position. How to reinvent? To recreate stories that can be relatable and in particular, those which will not radiate negative vibes is the best way to do that. And is that just the writer’s quotient? As a television maven, I have a definite answer – NO. The channel decides all that, just to retain the TRP numbers. A mother in law who will suspect a daughter in law whose intention is to just covet the family property hence pop up their malicious wings in the sky of the television screen and wither its pernicious colours in the psyche of the viewers.
Why does that happen? Modern life has just left back a ruckus of loneliness in them that they dialogue with celluloid images and” become “them. Then they exercise what they have seen on screens as the reality of life – suspect if the daughters-in-law have poisoned them and so on. Television mainly delineates women characters as protagonists. But are they portrayed with the real colours? Most men write scripts. Men write dialogues in which women talk. The stale flavour it creates is never given a thought. I have seen a channel in India where the core team of the channel were all women: Many Bengali serials are written mostly by women and they are very popular and decent and many of them are remade in other regional languages. I quote all these absolutely with no accusations but with the only intention of escalating the quality of content. Last week I read about an OTT platform that will be a female-centric one – with an only female playing all roles – on and off-screen. When this experimentation is possible in a streaming platform, why not in television- both on and off the small screen?
A piece of art should shower positivity even in times of peril. That’s what makes it dimensional. Like a rainbow evolving out of a rain – such content will always rain hope in society. Ultimately all boisterous criticisms made on Television will be uprooted and people will start enjoying mature handling of screenplays. Moreover, with the emergence of OTTs the common hypothetical statement that television will have a natural death in a decade – as what theatres had, will be nullified and television will be resurrected. There are good serials to quote in some Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil television scenarios as well. They demarcate conflicts with good values. Malice with Virtues but the ratio is so small that such attempts haven’t been recognised. The difference between qualitative stuff and those which make numbers is less noted and never dialogue upon.
The concern to write this article springs from my long tenure in the television media which reaches millions of people from vast cultural backgrounds in a minute and that process is magical. If that loses lustre because of the repeated plots and mundane conflicts, it’s high time we embrace the contemporary real-life issues and Wipe off the rust and SHINE.
Article is authored by Anup Chandrasekharan.
