Soaps for Men

A shorter version of this appeared in Open, 28 March 2011. A link is here.

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Time was television viewing in India used to be a family affair. Programmes didn’t always divide viewers on lines of gender; fiction wasn’t always coloured pink or blue. It is true the Doordarshan era didn’t offer us any channels to squabble over but what we got catered very nicely to everybody. We had epic sagas, urban family dramas, adapted works of literature, historicals, mythology, fantasy, thrillers and whodunits. The men enjoyed Byomkesh Bakshi, Barrister Vinod and Karamchand but they also followed Hum Log, Buniyaad and Khandaan.

All that changed at the turn of the century. A young woman called Ekta Kapoor came up with a soap opera named Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi. It was targeted at women and they embraced it with an enthusiasm that had media watchers reeling. It altered the face of television-viewing in India, it spawned a thriving industry and the daily soap became an institution. Through the decade, women came to rule television – both on it and in front of it.

There are some positive spin-offs from the emergence of the ‘Saas-Bahu’ phenomenon but there were casualties too – the first of these being diversity in our television choices. The soap is such a dominant entity that although General Entertainment Channels (GECs) struggle every now and then to throw off its yoke, they haven’t managed it. Over the past year, reality television managed to appeal to male as well as female audiences but fiction – the citadel – is still held by women.

It is against this background that we must examine Sony TV’s attempts to offer programming with a slight male skew. Their long-running CID is a popular staple; in 2007 they tried to revive Karamchand, the carrot-chomping detective we loved in the ‘80s, and they recently introduced Adalat, a Perry Mason-style courtroom drama that actor Ronit Roy carries off with aplomb. But the most distinctive programming comes as a result of Sony TV’s partnership with Yash Raj Films Television. Made for metro audiences while the rest of the industry addresses the Indian small town, oriented towards general rather than female audiences, and by actually having male-centric narratives, YRF’s offerings are determinedly different.

In the beginning of 2010, the partnership yielded four fiction shows, all different from anything on the screen at the time. If they worked, they would mark the return of variety to mainstream television. Regrettably, they were not a raging success. Romantic comedies Mahi Way and Rishta.com were good but they were half heartedly promoted and badly scheduled. As for the others, you’d imagine that it’s difficult to mess up an old fashioned good-versus-evil yarn involving various kinds of delicious supernatural powers, but fantasy thriller Seven managed to mangle it comprehensively.

This year, YRF has come up with two shows: Khote Sikkey and Kismat. The first has a Mumbai cop assembling an unusual team of crime-fighters: five high-society, small-time offenders who help him gain entry and insight into the moneyed classes. Kismat is a saga on the lines of Jeffery Archer’s Kane and Abel, tracing (over 60 years) the lives and intersections of two men, Aditya Merchant and Kabir Khan.

Khote Sikkey

As is typical with YRF products, these are slickly produced shows. Then again, there is the danger of letting the gloss take over. Khote Sikkey’s good ideas on paper, for instance, don’t translate very well. It should have been an edgy crime drama with interesting characters and glib lines, all the while taking a close look at the awful turpitude of high society. So they have moody lighting which usually works better in film than on television, the camera endlessly circles its actors with the result that crucial expressions are lost to us while the lens is working its way past an obtruding lamp, the characters are mere cardboards, and the screenplay and acting suffer from an odd self consciousness. It is wannabe stylish but, sadly, not much more.

If loose writing is a problem with Khote Sikkey, Kismat battles an issue with pacing. This is a period story and gets many things very right: the acting, the ambience and the dialogues are excellent. Viraf Phiroz Patel and Rahul Bagga are superb as the warring protagonists and there’s an attractive classiness about the series. But each episode tends to tell us more than it shows us and, smart though it is, the show needs to makes an emotional connect.

Nothing succeeds like success, it is tritely said. Certainly true of television. So, are these the shows that will galvanise the television industry out of its female orientation? No. But when the breakthrough occurs, perhaps Sony TV will get a little credit for chip-chipping away.

Makes You C-C-C-Cringe

Indian television’s fascination with international franchises continues. After Kaun Banega Crorepati, Indian Idol, Fear Factor, Masterchef and a host of others, here comes a version of the international game show format Wipeout. Bollywood stars tend to eye these new reality shows with almost lascivious relish, and this one hopes to ride on the shoulders of the ever-keen Shah Rukh Khan.

Zor ka Jhatka: Total Wipeout started to air on Imagine TV on 1 February. Shot on a massive obstacle course in Argentina, the game comprises various rounds of competition before winners make it to the final ‘Wipeout Zone’ and then ultimately to the finale. The 16-episode run offers participants a whack at Rs 1.5 crore.

Now a game show of this sort has its place in the scheme of things. It’s only when the game show in question starts to assume other elements of grandeur that it begins to grate. And that is the problem with Zor ka Jhatka. It doesn’t want to be the mildly amusing, moderately popular game show that it is all over the world; it wants be a ‘duniya ka sabse bada, sabse anokha’ (the world’s biggest, most unique)  game show. 

But first, the contestants. They numbered 30 when the show began, but what with dropouts, eliminations, wild cards, special SRK recommendations, the exact count has been lost. These are an assortment of TV actors, sportspersons, army commandoes… but a bulk of them are what you might call ‘reality TV specialists’— a fearsome, hardy breed of wannabes who will assiduously apply to (and be taken on) any reality show that needs discretion, dignity and decorum left far behind.

Typically, as the participants go through the obstacles, Wipeout is attended by two sets of anchors—one on the spot for interviews and reactions (a job held by Saumya Tandon in this version) and another presenter (or two) to provide humorous running commentary on the proceedings—that is, Shah Rukh Khan.

Unfortunately, Khan is ill at ease, he tries too hard and he’s more than a little crass. His mockery of the unsuspecting participants—echoing them in high-pitched falsetto—offends us, the pelvic thrust that he finds necessary to perform every time ‘zor ka jhatka’ is uttered makes us cringe, and his jokes do not make us laugh. He inflicts his preoccupations and insecurities on us. “Kisike paas Kareena hai, kisike paas Katrina hai, mere paas Khabreena hai,” he tells us, reducing his co-host to an informant. He becomes inordinately excited by ‘Big Balls’—a course that involves giant rubber balls that contestants must navigate. We are naturally clued in to the fact that ‘big balls’ sounds like Bigg Boss, a show only recently anchored by another Khan.

Part of the problem is the logistics and the producers’ slippery hold on how to make it work. Standing in Mumbai, SRK is expected to comment daily on a video recording of activities in Buenos Aires. This means a significant loss of spontaneity. Not only does SRK not interact with participants in person, but worse, the banter between the two stations is manufactured at the editor’s table. Having invested in so many celebrities, the producers are unable to balance their airtime between the happenings in Argentina (which could have been interesting if we’d been privy to the backstage excitement or engaged more with the personalities) and the set where SRK presides. They err on the side of SRK. The contestants, chosen presumably for their respective star-pull, are severely underused. Even the production quality falls short of Wipeout, US, standards.

The studio is rendered odious by a few factors. One, a series of Bollywood celebs (Abhishek Bachchan, Kangana Ranaut, Priyanka Chopra), who come on to hard-sell their forthcoming movies. Two, sponsors who find it in their power to actually infiltrate the content rather than merely book-end it. So Khan says the words ‘Chocolaty Laila’ on cue as they appear on the screen.

Still, Zor ka Jhatka achieves what it craved—to be talked about. I mean, we like Javed Jaffrey’s Takeshi’s Castle better but then, we are reviewing Shah Rukh Khan here.


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This appeared in Open magazine, issue dated 28th February 2011.

Colours of life

In one strip from Calvin & Hobbes, Calvin is seeking information from his erratic father. “Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have colour film back then?” Calvin’s dad, who likes his little jokes, tells him: “Sure they did. In fact, those photographs are colour. It’s just the world was black and white then.”

It’s easy to believe him. Look at old family albums, silent movies and the wonderful era of black-and-white cinema — we (those of us from this generation) have a hard time paint-bucketing colour into the world as we imagine it was then. Our visual conditioning assures us it must have been monochrome or sepia-tinted. But eventually, we will no longer be put to the trouble of conjuring up mind pictures, for the colourisation of our nostalgia is on.

The opulent Mughal-e-Azam was retouched, pigmented and released in 2004. Since then we have had other classics repackaged thus — Naya Daur and earlier this month, Hum Dono. In the south, we have embraced anew the cult mythological Mayabazaar. There are many more to come in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada.

It isn’t cinema alone. Discovery Channel has begun a 13-part series called World War II in Colour — a magnificent sweep of the events between 1939 and 1945 narrated by Robert Powell. The footage, acquired from across the world, has been painstakingly cleaned, re-coloured and restored. Even I, normally averse to retellings of WWII, am caught up in the epic drama of it all.

Colourisation of our collective black-and-white past may be the dernier cri in India, but it is a fad that has run its course in Hollywood. In the ’80s, media moghul Ted Turner embarked on a rather insensitive colourisation drive that had lovers of cinema up in arms. When he coloured and reintroduced Casablanca, film critic Roger Ebert was unequivocal in his loathing of what he termed “artistic sin”. He said in 2005: “Anyone who can accept the idea of colorisation of black-and-white films has bad taste.” In India too, although the coloured Mughal-e-Azam was accepted by uncritical masses, it had its detractors. Cinematographers and film historians were deeply uneasy. Mahesh Bhatt compared it to “painting the Red Fort in acrylic emulsion”.

It is a worthy debate. The critics make thoroughly valid points. There is no doubt a film shot for the contrasts of black and white is tainted, diminished by the introduction of colour. We would be equally aghast, I imagine, if someone mooted the idea of colouring Pyaasa or Kaagaz ke Phool or Charulata. But what of films where black and white was not an artistic choice but a necessity? K Asif longed to make Mughal-e-Azam in colour and was only impeded by his circumstances. He brought in craftspersons from all over India to bring authenticity to jewels, costumes and weaponry. Belgian glass was imported to adorn the famous Sheesh Mahal. The battle sequences were the grandest India had seen. It was a film that cried out to be seen in colour. Mayabazaar too is a grand spectacle of a film whose frames are deepened, not degraded, by colourisation.

The techniques of colourisation may perhaps influence opinion as well. Early attempts were crude, and not unlike the crayons Orson Welles once accused Ted Turner of wielding. But now, programmes are able to intelligently guess the colour used originally. Even the five or six years since Mughal-e-Azam have seen technological advances — studios now use 16.7 million shades against the 65,000 colours the previous generation did. The effects are subtle and, for the most part, aesthetic.

This sounds like an argument for colour, but had Guru Dutt consulted me before he re-shot the title song of Chaudvin ka Chand in colour, I’d have begged him not to. I suppose the test is to look at a film with love and ask of it how it would like to be rendered.

Music without boundaries

Last week, I attended a production called 100 Charmers. Director Roysten Abel had gathered five score saperas (snake charmers) from in and around Delhi to perform in an ensemble that was mostly music but presented with fine, dramatic flair. Set against the medieval Taramati Baradari on the outskirts of Hyderabad, the musicians lifted their beens to play an impressive repertoire.

This contained a few pieces that had me pondering the cross-currents of music, the interplay of different streams, and how riffs and even musical influences may travel from the grassroots of folk, up to the rarefied realms of the classical, and then be reinterpreted as accessible film music. Naturally, they performed Hemant Kumar’s interpretation of the sapera’s tune from Nagin (1954) — a reading so sublime and inevitable, it was in turn adopted by the snake charmer community as its anthem. The tune has stayed with India as the quintessential aural prompt for snakes. The musicians then played Kajrare from Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s Bunty aur Babli and the hymn Amazing Grace. The saperas had reinvented themselves — and extended their survival. In rendering Kajrare with their plaintive, rustic strains, they also owned the song in a delightfully new way. Purists may purse their lips but surely such borrowings can only enrich a musical system.

Film music is not given sufficient credit for its role in channelling music that lies outside its ambit. If the general public has heard Bade Ghulam Ali Khan at all, it’s probably the snatch he sang for Mughal-e-Azam. Many heard of Ustad Rashid Khan for the first time because he sang Aaoge jab tum in Jab We Met. I attended a concert of his in Delhi a couple of years ago and not even his elaborate Kirwani elicited as many cheers as when he started on Aaoge… For a man feted by the world of classical music, he was absurdly pleased.

Film music has depicted folk tunes in innumerable instances. It has included Kabir, Tulsidas, Meera, Khusrau, Rahim and Bulle Shah. It has used folk narrative genres, too. I have a particular favourite from recent years. Punjabi folk has employed jugni, a peripatetic female narrator who observes the world and provides her commentary, for almost a century now. I was particularly pleased to hear it in Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye, Sneha Khanwalkar’s sharply authentic 2008 album.

It hasn’t all been one-way though. Classical music too has dipped from time to time into the lower orders or into parallel streams to pick up skeins that are now woven into their own fabric. Pandit Kumar Gandharva coopted folk renditions of Kabir into his own style of Nirguni bhajan and Carnatic music has taken the Marathi Varkari tradition of abhangs into its fold.

But, to my mind, there is one very certain level of success — when you trickle down to the lowest common denominator. As the snake charmers have reclaimed their tunes, so have others made some songs their own. Train singers favour a certain high-pitched type of song that allows them to be heard above the din of trains, and ones that fall into the chugging rhythm; Mela dilon ka… they like, and also, Pardesi, pardesi jaana nahin…

One other community has been revitalised these past years: wedding band players. Their repertoire used to comprise the decades-old Raja ki aayegi baraat and Mera yaar bana hai dulha. But now, thanks to Amit Trivedi’s Emosanal Atyachar, a song made for the trumpets of the baraat, the band is fashionable again. I wouldn’t be surprised to find the lively title song of Band Baja Baraat blaring out at the next wedding I attend. 

Those happy old New Years

The world stepped out to welcome the New Year last week while I sought refuge in my quilt, nursing a miserable cold over a glass of rasam. Even television — a friend on most occasions — let me down. Brittle hype was lined up on channel after channel, attempts at humour on one, spectacle on the other. It was so unsatisfactory I turned it off without waiting for the countdown to midnight and, perversely, went to sleep.

New Year's Eve, as TV channels conceive it, is the most manufactured of celebrations; similar ensembles are put together routinely for Holi, Diwali and other festivals but somehow work better than they do here. On the subject of New Year’s Eve, my mind runs no doubt out of sheer sentimentality, to the good old days. Those years in the 1980s and ’90s when Doordarshan, our one window to the world, kept us company in the hours leading to midnight.

I remember the comedian Jaspal Bhatti entertaining us; the short comedy skits that were, I’m now certain, only mildly funny. There was Gurdas Maan singing his trademark ‘Dil da mamla hai’, pausing playfully at ‘Dil…’ and all of us rushing in to prompt him. I remember Penaaz Masani, Falguni Pathak, Sharon Prabhakar, Javed Jaffrey and Usha Uthup. I cannot honestly say they sang or danced or performed better than anyone on the stage today — certainly, nostalgia plays a large part in giving that age its patina of being special.

That nostalgia isn’t restricted to the New Year’s Eve specials, it envelops the entire Doordarshan era. Bring it up and you’re essentially calling for a whole lot of people to wistfully remember their own favourites. Chitrahaar, someone will invariably say. Hum Log and Buniyaad will get a few mentions. Then the Sunday morning line-up, the Saturday afternoon specials, the weekend movies we waited all week for. There is something vivid about these recollections — it isn’t just about what they saw, it is about what they felt. Curiously, people talk often of staring at the colour bars before Doordarshan’s slowly spiralling logo came on the screen.

There is a sea change from our worlds then and now. Our minds and sensitivities were clean three decades ago — tabula rasas waiting to be imprinted on. We weren’t assaulted by images, sounds, media, opinions. We were able to focus on whatever we looked at, an attitude that seems almost zen in comparison to how we are now.

What does our fondness for the Doordarshan years mean? Does the advent of TV only bookmark a time when our impressions were at their freshest? Is it also due in part to the fact that TV viewing used to be so communal? In the early days, the entire neighbourhood would pour into the one home that housed the TV set. Later, even when every home acquired its own, we would gather to discuss what we watched. This collective experience is quite incommunicable to the spoilt-for-choice cable-&-satellite TV generation. It is impossible to convey to someone who wasn’t there what it meant. It was, quite simply, an age of innocence. Perhaps it boils down to the fact that we — all of India with access to TV sets — were on the same page, looking at exactly the same thing. DD’s much used placard that said ‘Rukavat ke liye khed hai’ signified an entire nation in limbo — sighing in frustration at a frame that might leap into animation any minute now. Never again will we know that kind of unity.