Saas Bahu and Sex

“That woman should be shot for corrupting the minds of Indian people and women in particular” said my attractive female friend about Ekta Kapoor. I have not watched even 5 minutes of any serial made by Ekta Kapoor or her ilk, so I was intrigued. “But why?” I asked. “Doesn’t she show the triumph of the Bhartiya Naari and her value system?” “What bloody bhartiya naari and what value system!” She replied back. “The heroines sleep around with multiple men and have kids from them. The heroines defend that giving ‘a moment of weakness’ excuses. Similarly the men keep falling for the vamps that’ve no aim in life other than to bed those useless fellows. Everyone is sleeping around with everyone else.” “And you North-Indians should actually pelt stones at her. Because of those serials nowadays everyone here in the South think all North Indians are like that – promiscuous & loose-minded. My mother will never marry me off to any North Indian guy more so because of this perception”

Apart from being disturbing because of the narrowing of my (and most probably your) marital prospects, this conversation raised some broader questions. I’m not in a position to verify what she’d said about Ekta-Kapooresque serials and frankly I cannot undergo 60 minutes of torture just to confirm that. I will much rather use my other observations to arrive at the same conclusion – That Indian television is becoming little more than “Saas Bahu and Sex”

It all started with the arrival of cable television in India post Gulf War 1 with shows like “Baywatch” and “Bold & the beautiful” exposing Indian audiences for the first time to sex on television. Then Friends came along and an entire generation grew up watching them. As long as it was restricted to English channels, no one cared as a miniscule minority watched them. Till the kind folks at MTV decided to make “crass entertainment” mainstream in the name of “youth entertainment” and brought in ‘Roadies’. Now Roadies is the small screen equivalent of a brainless Chinese flick which has loads of unbelievable action (flying around), wink-wink sex (talk about it but don’t show it) and outright stupid dialogues but little substance. However people liked it because it was a quasi-reality show about how hot chicks and dudes behave in real life.

Roadies became a hit spawning an entire genre of masala stuff and crowded the TV spectrum with filth. Let’s take the case of “Emotional Atyachaar” on ‘Bindaas’. They make hot chicks seduce ordinary guys who probably haven’t even talked to a girl having that high a hotness quotient in their lives. For one such hot girls have their own standards and will never do such a thing in real life so it’s impractical. It’s akin to showing a pot of gold to a beggar and when he dips his hand in it, you clap your hands in glee saying “Gee, I told you so! He’s greedy”. Secondly this is an extreme form of tactic used on highest ranking generals and officials during WAR-TIME to eke secrets out of them. Sex spies (Hot chicks) are used to lay what are called “honey-traps” for such high-ranking individuals and it’s so wildly successful that we’ve an entire department in counter espionage to avoid such cases. And you’re using such a powerful weapon on susceptible ordinary people when there’s no contingency at all.

Recently in the gym, I caught an episode of TRUTH, LOVE, CASH , apparently one of the “7 deadly shows” on Channel V. Here a bunch of real-life couples are taken and are randomly juggled to have different onscreen opposites. Then they’re asked to do a set of demeaning tasks which will prove if they value their love or the prize money at the end of the show. One of the tasks was for the onscreen couples to do a sexually suggestive dance and get audience votes for the lustiest dance of them all. One of the girls decided to do a pseudo-striptease with her onscreen opposite touching her at all the inappropriate(?) places. She opened her shirt for a while revealing her undergarment and then snapped it back again. Later on she was telling camera “Yes I did that because we needed audience votes. But I did it for only a moment because we also have to answer our PARENTS” Hey, Hey Hold on Girl! If (although I doubt that) your parents ask why you showed your stuff, this is the “answer” you’ll give? “It’s ok papa, it was momentary! “ You’re doing a suggestive strip-tease in front of national TV and want us to believe that you’re still steeped in our culture. What illustrates the typical Indian hypocrisy better. We believe sex to be something alien to our culture and hence don’t accept it openly. Maybe this is the reason why we’re having crass sexually suggestive entertainment on TV, semi-nude pics on national newspapers like Times of India, B-grade novels and movies selling by the hordes. It shows that we’re the most sexually repressed people on the planet. Don’t believe me? Type in UNZIP on both google.com and google.co.in and see the suggestions which these different google pages throw up. Maybe (and that’s a big maybe) if we accept this facet of our life, we will have something better – something like F.R.I.E.N.D.S.

Coming to F.R.I.E.N.D.S, it is intended for a target audience and that audience is definitely not the teens. Its indeed a very powerful evangelism tool for the American way of life. Before I started watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S , I was an ordinary middle-class dreamer who believed success and happiness is achieved by hard-work and dedication towards your goal in life. I was a one-woman man and had fantastical (if impractical) notions about love being a pristine and a “know-it-when-you-feel-it” entity. Then F.R.I.E.N.D.S happened and by the time I was done with it, it had done me in. Now I didn’t deserve to live as I didn’t have a girlfriend, my virginity was a shack of stones on my back weighing me down in life and which should be cast away at the first opportunity, I needed to get a life as I was home reading/working on a Saturday night and my life had been a failure because I’ve done nothing except working on my career. As I grew older I realised F.R.I.E.N.D.S has a very sublime message many of us fail to read. Who among the F.R.I.E.N.D.S onscreen characters is doing a job any of us will aspire to? They’re all mostly less ambitious individuals who’re contented with their way of life and have no hopes of making it big in life. So friends, if you want to follow the F.R.I.E.N.D.S kind of lifestyle then prepare to sacrifice some of your career goals as well – This is the message which is true in US as well. About 84% of MIT Math majors are virgins. Rejoice!

So Indian TV like Indian cinema, with few exceptions is going down the drains. What can we do about it? Absolutely nothing. Get along with your work and pray for the education situation in India to improve so that people start demanding substance, all channels of black money to be stopped so that it actually hurts financially when a crappy TV show flops , TV channels to introduce self-censorship so that they’re forced to think creatively rather than take the easy way out by producing cheap and vulgar entertainment. Its clear why I said pray because this is not an action-list or a wish-list but a pray-list. One which you know won’t happen.