I think it was at a train station that I got my first ever so called comic book. I faintly remember I couldn’t read then and my mother read out the comic’s name – LOT POT. Ofcourse I didn’t understand what that meant and she had to explain it. The expression that can come closest to explaining what Lot-Pot means in English would be “RTOFL”. Well inside it didn’t much keep up its promise though I guess the concepts of pairs – a tall and a short guy ( lambu chotu) or a fat and a thin one ( Motu Patlu) was considered a sure fire hit with mindless children like us. I remember being mighty disappointed with the whole thin colourful comic. Had it not been called LOT-POT and got my hopes up, just maybe I might have enjoyed it a bit more.
The next one I came across was called Champak. It had something to do with a trying-to-be-oversmart rabbit. That too wasn’t so good as it had very few pictures and too many words.
A good thing happened and I acquired some reading skills before I tried any more of the indigenous Indian reading material for kids. Chandamama was something of a well known monthly magazine and some kids even had subscriptions to it
( or it came with the newspaper). It had a very typical cover with the logo on the left and the red band across which was emblazoned its name. You could see the same in any language ( was published in several) and you knew it to be Chandamama!
It was a collection of short-stories with the highlight being the Vikram-Betaal episode. ( the first few times I flipped through Chandamama, I always used to jump this because I found the picture of the ferocious looking Vikram with a blood stained sword too disturbing. It grieved me to see them repeating the same story every edition almost as if on purpose! ) The rest of the stories were full of morals and I remember that the illustrations always had very neatly dressed people and almost empty houses. The rich mans house would have some pots and pans as well as a bed. The poor people always had just 4 bare walls. Each one of the characters of all the stories put together seemed related to each other because they dressed almost alike and well, resembled each other!
In class 2, I read my first simple Enid Blytons like so many small children around the world. It was limited to Noddy and Amelia Jane the Naughty Doll stories. Was simple and it was fun. I particularly remember the story of the acorns around the dolls neck which suddenly sprouted and sent shock shivers down her spine or something to that affect.
One day my father returned from a trip to Delhi and got me an Enid Blyton “book”. It was called “Those Dreadful Children” and I remember being so wary of it because it had real small print! Not at all like the one word per square inch print of Noddy! But read I did and how I enjoyed it and how much it influenced me! It made me so conscious of good behavior and manners.
In the book, the father takes aside his unruly sons and teaches them “how to behave with girls” and goes on to tell them the girls are more delicate beings and hence one should be a gentleman and so on and so forth.
So deep rooted did this book become in me that in one of the fights/arguments with some boys at school I went on loudly – hasn’t your father taught you how to behave with girls? I can never forget the look that boy gave me! He must have thought I have landed from Mars or something. Forget teaching their sons how to behave with girls, fathers back then never had the time to teach their sons to behave at all. It was all well as we were!
I am sure all of us graduated slowly into the Secret Seven first and the Famous Five soon after that. The girls secretly hoped to be in a boarding such as St Claires and Mallory towers and then soon after ditched Enid Blyton and branched off into the Nancy Drew books. When that happened and the boys picked up hardy boys, it was a sure sign that you were now “grown up”
You could outgrow Noddy, you could outgrow Enid Blyton and you could even outgrow Nancy Drew. One thing you could never outgrow was AMAR CHITRA KATHA comics. You could be disowned by your own if you ever dared to say that these were not nice!
More than the thrill of reading one was turning to the yellow coloured page at the end of the comic and tick which all you had already read!
Oh the joy of acquiring a new Amar Chitra Katha and adding it to your collection. (A collection that never really grew because so many kids were borrowing from it and writing their names on some and becoming their second hand owners! )That title and that familiar Surya logo on the top. Centre-middle. Now that is the correct alignment. The new one with a square frame and a glossy thick cover and the logo on the left! no no no, aint the real thing.
Everyone wanted to be your friend if you had some rare titles. The coveted ones were – Rishyashringa, Kounchini, Raja Raja Chola ( fascinating that double Raja) , Devi Choudhrani ( sold because of the beautiful lady with the gold coins on the cover), Abhimanyu, Savitri and that fiery Anand Math!
Absolutely loved them! And I think we learnt more from them than we ever did from the best history lessons at school.
At about the age of 10 or so, we reached the pinnacle of being intellectually inclined when we started reading the Readers Digest. You could always lay your hands on old copies from somewhere – doctors waiting rooms being one example. Back then it used to be much thicker than it is now and used to have the index right there –bang- on the top page. No slim editions, no gloss. Just a coloured band on the rib.
Inside was a host of articles – the one or two political ones you would skip. There was always one like “I survived a plane crash” or “ how I lived through 6 months in a sewage pipe” or “I was attacked by a grizzly”. These were highly motivational stories back then. But what pulled us to the Readers Digest was the humour. Life’s like that!, Humour in Uniform, All in a days work, Quotable quotes etc were devoured first! They even had a page to increase your vocabulary. But man weren’t they notorious for the junk post you got. All of us got taken in by the “special prize inside” envelopes when we first got them. Oh now, we have smartened up. Yes sir!
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Television
My earliest memories of a television are that of not owning one! This is in 1975. I remember that down the road there lived a family who had these bluish hues of colour emanating from their living room window which not only us, but many passers by used to give jealous glances. It’s a different matter all together that inside the “lucky” ones actually watched grainy collections of tiny molecules trying hard to form a fathomable song and dance. Until 1977, there were only 650,000 TV sets in India and not a single piece of that was in our house.
In 1977, there came into our house, a real television and our joy knew no bounds. It was a Weston! A wooden box of dark brown seasoned wood, resting on very shaky but shapely legs of thin wood shod with metallic cup stands- always used to remind me of a lady in stilletoes ( called pencil heels way back then) and had rolling shutters in the front – very ingenious if you think about it. Wonder why they did away with those? Come to think of it they seem practical. There was also a very protective blue screen that went on to the actual grey screen with two tiny silver clips on either sides to prevent the mega strain of watching black & white TV for all of 2 hours a day! These rolling shutters had two little handles with which you could ceremoniously throw open the curtains at 6 PM sharp to hear the lullabic tunes of Doordarshan announcing the beginning of the “shaam ki sabha” with its lilty tune which brought on its casper like logo proclaiming it to be Satyam, Shivam Sundaram.
If you had recently acquired the gadget, you would actually sit and rivet your eyes on the diagram they had on from 5.30 PM or so. No, not those vertical black and white bars across the screen but the circle preceding those lines divided into 4 large arcs with some weird measurements and graphs on it – or so it seemed. When the lines came on, everyone in the house wanted to show their talent in adjusting the clarity with all of 3 buttons there were on the TV set apart from the round Channel Changer which went in clicks around 12 numbers – Volume, Brightness and Contrast. You twisted each of the thimble size buttons around a bit and announced- there! Now see how clear this is. Each line is distinct! Of course no one ever agreed with you!
No TV set was complete without the large and the clumsiest contraption ever to be made in the history of electronics – the antenna! This absolutely had to be placed in the most strategic corner and height on the roof or any other highest point you could get it to and make it stay. If your dad was very clever and had nimble hands, he could also twist it to “catch Pakistan”. Never mind that one never really got to see anything on Pakistan TV but it was atleast a second channel! How many pleasant, frustrating and hilarious stories in every household are centered on the fine art of turning the ever dodgy antenna into that perfect position and angle? Fine art it sure was – and a study in team work. The one with the sharpest eyes had to keep a stare at the TV and be a good judge on when the picture is at the clearest, scream it out to the loud sibling just outside the window who had to scream up to the person standing on one leg and adjusting the direction of the antenna. The trick was in getting the message to position 3 from Position 1 and yet maintain the good picture. A split second delay would mean a – phir gaya!!!! I think mostly everyone just gave up after about 15 minutes and made a happy compromise with whatever the state of the picture was as long as it was better than at the start of the exercise. The inspiration would return again in a few days!
From this antenna ran a flat black wire which ran the length of your walls and through the window and into the back of the TV where you would have wound the copper endings around two connectors. Many a antenna-fixing sessions have ended in sheer frustration only to discover that it was actually the wire which had come off the connector either at the TV end or the antenna end. With such connections, it is even surprising how we got to see anything at all!
And yet! We saw – everything that they could offer – right from Krishi Darshan to the English Bulletin and the Hindi Samachar. I cant remember a fourth thing! The very earliest advertisements were just still pictures. A still picture of a beautiful young thing sitting next to a neat bicycle proclaiming – Atlas cyle – yeh kabhi aapko raaste me dokha nahi degi! ( or was that for Sahni Tyre aur Tube?) And my personal favourite – Farishta ki been baji. .…which had a genie like man with a snake charmers flute sending all the clothes to a mighty wash into the soap box! Every now and then we would be treated to what were the first taste of animations – small clips from the National Film Development corporation. Remember – Ek Titli, anek titlian? They did have some intermittent hindi plays – no they were called skits then.
And ofcourse, as far back as I can remember, we always had Chitrahaar at 8 PM on Wednesdays. You couldn’t possibly face your classmates on Thursday morning if you missed the Chitrahaar. ( I even think Krishi Darshan got its fame because it preceded Chitrahaar. So the entire Television watching population of the country knew what to do about the little green bugs on the red beetroot plants or how to mix 3 portions of DDT and 1 portion of XYZ white powder, mix it in 5 parts water and spray it all over your moong daal field! ) Chitrahaar needs no introduction but for the uninitiated, it was a half hour programme based on hindi movie songs. In its initial formats, it always had two songs from a single movie – (maybe because it was easier work on the guy at the TV station hunting in the archives?). So when we became experienced, we could almost guess which songs were yet to come in the second half. The songs had nothing to do with the movies being released at that time. They were always from Barsaat ki Raat or Noorie or Kashmir ki Kali or Guide or Mughal-E-Azam or Shree 420 and give or take a few, it always was a combination of these!( Did you know that Chitrahaar is still alive and was part of a unique experiment in the recent past. Experts subtitle Chitrahaar with SLS – ‘same language subtitling’ and this increases the literacy level in rural India. Howzzat for innovation? It was found that people find it easier to start reading when they saw the subtitles on a bollywood song rather than when they read a book!)
On Sundays,…yeah, yeah the weekly Hindi movie!! 6 PM and two breaks ( ONLY). The Hindi samachar at 7.30 and the English Bulletin at 8.30. Just before the Hindi movie started was the settling in time which was chosen strategically by the Doordarshan to announce the missing persons list. “Gumshuda wayaqtion ki jaankaari” More than the fact that all lost people were of wheatish complexion ( very few belonged to the category Rang Gora, some were of Rang Sawlan which was a shade fairer than Rang Geyhuan) what held us captive was “ek ek shoonya shoonya shoonya ek” in the address. I don’t think anyone of us would have known the number zero by any other name than its English version, had it not been for the Pin Code address of Doordarshan!
In February 1979, a total Solar eclipse was to occur over India. It swept the whole country’s imagination! The television fueled the excitement even more. A holiday was declared in schools or it was a Sunday – I cant really remember – I do know that we were supposed to stay indoors, darken our windows, close the doors, wear dark glasses, not look at the sun…the only thing they left out was – don’t breathe! Doordarshan took it upon itself to educate the masses on every aspect of the eclipse. I think everyone fell in love with Doordarshan that day because they so innovatively announced a 2 PM movie! That in itself was an event! But what joys these things gave us then. Now on any given day you may have a minimum of 24 movies running in various languages, but it just doesn’t work, does it?
That reminds me of the regional language movie that used to be shown once they started the Saturday afternoon transmissions. ( the Sunday mornings happened before this). The novelty were the subtitles! Our first taste of them! It didn’t matter if the movie was Bhojpuri or Malyalam. We loved them because we could read and understand a whole new language!
Amongst the bold new steps that DD took much before time, was to introduce the weekly news for the hearing impaired. It did seem funny ( sorry, about this – but then sign language wasn’t known then at all – until Marlee Matlin made it famous for us at the Oscars as late as 1986!). We gazed in amazement at the lady who could have done with a bit of god’s benevolence on her looks, as she moved her podgy hands into various forms. A thought always used to cross my mind, who would be checking her in any case – even if she went wrong?!
There was another popular but now forgotten half hour programme – our introduction to talk shows – Phool Khile Hain Gulshan Gulshan. What was it that made it popular? The beauty & the bubbliness of Tabassum the hostess? The guests? Or our insatiable hunger to know more about the celebrities? Our parents never let us forget that – Oh Tabassum? She has grown so much? She used to be a child artiste when we were young. Yeah yeah right, so you knew her before us! I read now that this programme ran on TV for 21 years!! 750 or so episodes!! Karan and Simi have a lot of catching up to do here!
Another programme I really want to mention is Swami Dhirendra Bhramachari’s Yoga sessions. Then he wasn’t notorious; he was just a very handsome and fit Bhramachari. Now, ofcourse one can put two and two together in a beautiful aasan and understand that a certain Mrs G would have had a firm hand in the Swami enjoying prime time and the spot light! He would stand with the programme hostess with two meek demonstrators – one male and one female in the front on two symmetric raised platforms. The Bramachari would instruct and they would follow. All of us, I think would remember the Padmasana and the Shavasan ( dead body aasan, which made me think, wow, now that’s easy – but how pray can it benefit anybody?) from then and it was probably the first exposure to Yoga we had. All this very well, but what really tickled us was all that bandage pushing and pulling out of the stomachs and the water pouring in and out of the nostrils. It made the programme somewhat in the league of – ripleys believe it or not, or the ‘I dare’ kind of programmes on AXN!!
Then there followed a spate of programmes as more and more transmitters were added in different states and cities. Colour TV came in in 1982 along with the Asiad games and a new trend of keeping up with the joneses started all over the country. You had to have colour! And these were curiously well rounded, chubby television sets.
We got out share of sitcom in Yeh Jo Hai zindagi which made Sofa-cum-bed a household name. I still kick myself for missing that episode. The whole world went sofa-cum-bed and giggle giggle, till I decided to go with the flow and also giggle. Until today, no one ever knew I missed the episode.
The much discussed and oft remembered Hum Log and Buniyaad followed. As did the “imported” programmes such as the mindless “fraggle rock” on Saturday afternoons, the Didi Comedy show. My favourite was “Telematch”, about those goofy country style games. But what made us truly believe in India Shining were the Grammy awards shown in the early 80s. I mean suddenly Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper, Stevie Wonder were our pals. The likes of us whose knowledge didn’t extend beyond Abba and Boney M until 1980, suddenly had posters of “Tears for Fears” and we were even in the know when they broke up and George Micheal came out with Father Figure. We Rocked! ( it was a big jump from watching Tops of the Pops every Saturday night and never getting to hear one number we recognized except if Abba came on with “chiquititi or “Voulez Vous”!). Sometime then Osi Bisa toured India and we even loved them and went Ojha hai Ojha with them happily! ( Okay fine, stop here and sing it if you want! Here’s help - Aroma kurva kurva kurva aroma kuruva).
The advertisements changed with the changing times. Karan Kapoor as the Bombay Dyeing Dream Lover took our breaths away, The Liril Girl was always surrounded by mystery ( everyone insisted she died on the way back from the shoot and no one ever questioned that fact. It was. That’s it ). The 7 Rs a pack of Nirma won the hearts of all housewives, and on the other hand you had Lalitha ji telling you where your cleverness and “samajhdaari” lies. You would kick yourself when you found yourself humming the catchy tune of the Carefree sanitary napkins ad! ( Now that I am a young girl…I can do the things I like…sic! ). Thums Up brought back the happy days and Campa Cola & Gold Spot made you believe life is an amusement park. Kapil Dev endorsed the Rapidex English speaking course and just because he was fresh back from the glory of winning the Prudential world cup for us we even overlooked the fact that he seemed to be needing it more than us!
One Ad that deserves a very big mention here is the Old Spice after shave ad. That surf and the haunting chorus came to be associated in our minds as the ultimate masculine symbol . I still associate the smell of Old Spice with teenage crushes and I can still identify it amongst a hundred smells. It can still make my head turn at airports and malls if I smell it.
Narottam Puri was to TV then what Harsha Bhogle is to Cricket now. He was the final authority on sports and all things sporty. Quizzing started with “Whats the good word” ( I remember a particular episode hosted by a highly bangled Dolly Thakore who jingled and jangled through out the programme!)
Sunday mornings were a date with Dr Spock and Captain Kirk which was followed by the various comedy serials one after the other. In the afternoons was the one about that totally demented Giant Robot, I can only remember it shooting missiles out of its wrist and his walk ( lopsided to the right and then to the left, throwing up smokes of dust) irritated me no end!
There came an era of Direct Telecasts. They did what they called a “Seedha prasaaran” from so many events. We related it to the Republic Day Parade with alternate English and Hindi commentaries and we would try and guess whether it was Neethi Ravindran or Minoo Talwar. If it was Hindi, it was sure to be either Salma Sultan or Mukta Srivastava. It was almost cute the way they stated the obvious – Giani Zail Singh getting off clumsily from the horse chariot would be “ab mananiye Rashrapati apni buggy se utar rahe hain” How it added to what we were seeing was something I didn’t understand – did they think we might deduce he was just a common man on Janpath on his regular mode of transport on a mildly rainy January morning?! All the same, the effort was marvelous and there was a joy and glory in watching each of the Tukdee march past the president.
Inspite of a widespread and strong belief that television spoilt the children and us having watched it sparingly as a result of that belief; those impressions have stayed stronger and gotten deeper in the years.
Thank you Doordarshan!
In 1977, there came into our house, a real television and our joy knew no bounds. It was a Weston! A wooden box of dark brown seasoned wood, resting on very shaky but shapely legs of thin wood shod with metallic cup stands- always used to remind me of a lady in stilletoes ( called pencil heels way back then) and had rolling shutters in the front – very ingenious if you think about it. Wonder why they did away with those? Come to think of it they seem practical. There was also a very protective blue screen that went on to the actual grey screen with two tiny silver clips on either sides to prevent the mega strain of watching black & white TV for all of 2 hours a day! These rolling shutters had two little handles with which you could ceremoniously throw open the curtains at 6 PM sharp to hear the lullabic tunes of Doordarshan announcing the beginning of the “shaam ki sabha” with its lilty tune which brought on its casper like logo proclaiming it to be Satyam, Shivam Sundaram.
If you had recently acquired the gadget, you would actually sit and rivet your eyes on the diagram they had on from 5.30 PM or so. No, not those vertical black and white bars across the screen but the circle preceding those lines divided into 4 large arcs with some weird measurements and graphs on it – or so it seemed. When the lines came on, everyone in the house wanted to show their talent in adjusting the clarity with all of 3 buttons there were on the TV set apart from the round Channel Changer which went in clicks around 12 numbers – Volume, Brightness and Contrast. You twisted each of the thimble size buttons around a bit and announced- there! Now see how clear this is. Each line is distinct! Of course no one ever agreed with you!
No TV set was complete without the large and the clumsiest contraption ever to be made in the history of electronics – the antenna! This absolutely had to be placed in the most strategic corner and height on the roof or any other highest point you could get it to and make it stay. If your dad was very clever and had nimble hands, he could also twist it to “catch Pakistan”. Never mind that one never really got to see anything on Pakistan TV but it was atleast a second channel! How many pleasant, frustrating and hilarious stories in every household are centered on the fine art of turning the ever dodgy antenna into that perfect position and angle? Fine art it sure was – and a study in team work. The one with the sharpest eyes had to keep a stare at the TV and be a good judge on when the picture is at the clearest, scream it out to the loud sibling just outside the window who had to scream up to the person standing on one leg and adjusting the direction of the antenna. The trick was in getting the message to position 3 from Position 1 and yet maintain the good picture. A split second delay would mean a – phir gaya!!!! I think mostly everyone just gave up after about 15 minutes and made a happy compromise with whatever the state of the picture was as long as it was better than at the start of the exercise. The inspiration would return again in a few days!
From this antenna ran a flat black wire which ran the length of your walls and through the window and into the back of the TV where you would have wound the copper endings around two connectors. Many a antenna-fixing sessions have ended in sheer frustration only to discover that it was actually the wire which had come off the connector either at the TV end or the antenna end. With such connections, it is even surprising how we got to see anything at all!
And yet! We saw – everything that they could offer – right from Krishi Darshan to the English Bulletin and the Hindi Samachar. I cant remember a fourth thing! The very earliest advertisements were just still pictures. A still picture of a beautiful young thing sitting next to a neat bicycle proclaiming – Atlas cyle – yeh kabhi aapko raaste me dokha nahi degi! ( or was that for Sahni Tyre aur Tube?) And my personal favourite – Farishta ki been baji. .…which had a genie like man with a snake charmers flute sending all the clothes to a mighty wash into the soap box! Every now and then we would be treated to what were the first taste of animations – small clips from the National Film Development corporation. Remember – Ek Titli, anek titlian? They did have some intermittent hindi plays – no they were called skits then.
And ofcourse, as far back as I can remember, we always had Chitrahaar at 8 PM on Wednesdays. You couldn’t possibly face your classmates on Thursday morning if you missed the Chitrahaar. ( I even think Krishi Darshan got its fame because it preceded Chitrahaar. So the entire Television watching population of the country knew what to do about the little green bugs on the red beetroot plants or how to mix 3 portions of DDT and 1 portion of XYZ white powder, mix it in 5 parts water and spray it all over your moong daal field! ) Chitrahaar needs no introduction but for the uninitiated, it was a half hour programme based on hindi movie songs. In its initial formats, it always had two songs from a single movie – (maybe because it was easier work on the guy at the TV station hunting in the archives?). So when we became experienced, we could almost guess which songs were yet to come in the second half. The songs had nothing to do with the movies being released at that time. They were always from Barsaat ki Raat or Noorie or Kashmir ki Kali or Guide or Mughal-E-Azam or Shree 420 and give or take a few, it always was a combination of these!( Did you know that Chitrahaar is still alive and was part of a unique experiment in the recent past. Experts subtitle Chitrahaar with SLS – ‘same language subtitling’ and this increases the literacy level in rural India. Howzzat for innovation? It was found that people find it easier to start reading when they saw the subtitles on a bollywood song rather than when they read a book!)
On Sundays,…yeah, yeah the weekly Hindi movie!! 6 PM and two breaks ( ONLY). The Hindi samachar at 7.30 and the English Bulletin at 8.30. Just before the Hindi movie started was the settling in time which was chosen strategically by the Doordarshan to announce the missing persons list. “Gumshuda wayaqtion ki jaankaari” More than the fact that all lost people were of wheatish complexion ( very few belonged to the category Rang Gora, some were of Rang Sawlan which was a shade fairer than Rang Geyhuan) what held us captive was “ek ek shoonya shoonya shoonya ek” in the address. I don’t think anyone of us would have known the number zero by any other name than its English version, had it not been for the Pin Code address of Doordarshan!
In February 1979, a total Solar eclipse was to occur over India. It swept the whole country’s imagination! The television fueled the excitement even more. A holiday was declared in schools or it was a Sunday – I cant really remember – I do know that we were supposed to stay indoors, darken our windows, close the doors, wear dark glasses, not look at the sun…the only thing they left out was – don’t breathe! Doordarshan took it upon itself to educate the masses on every aspect of the eclipse. I think everyone fell in love with Doordarshan that day because they so innovatively announced a 2 PM movie! That in itself was an event! But what joys these things gave us then. Now on any given day you may have a minimum of 24 movies running in various languages, but it just doesn’t work, does it?
That reminds me of the regional language movie that used to be shown once they started the Saturday afternoon transmissions. ( the Sunday mornings happened before this). The novelty were the subtitles! Our first taste of them! It didn’t matter if the movie was Bhojpuri or Malyalam. We loved them because we could read and understand a whole new language!
Amongst the bold new steps that DD took much before time, was to introduce the weekly news for the hearing impaired. It did seem funny ( sorry, about this – but then sign language wasn’t known then at all – until Marlee Matlin made it famous for us at the Oscars as late as 1986!). We gazed in amazement at the lady who could have done with a bit of god’s benevolence on her looks, as she moved her podgy hands into various forms. A thought always used to cross my mind, who would be checking her in any case – even if she went wrong?!
There was another popular but now forgotten half hour programme – our introduction to talk shows – Phool Khile Hain Gulshan Gulshan. What was it that made it popular? The beauty & the bubbliness of Tabassum the hostess? The guests? Or our insatiable hunger to know more about the celebrities? Our parents never let us forget that – Oh Tabassum? She has grown so much? She used to be a child artiste when we were young. Yeah yeah right, so you knew her before us! I read now that this programme ran on TV for 21 years!! 750 or so episodes!! Karan and Simi have a lot of catching up to do here!
Another programme I really want to mention is Swami Dhirendra Bhramachari’s Yoga sessions. Then he wasn’t notorious; he was just a very handsome and fit Bhramachari. Now, ofcourse one can put two and two together in a beautiful aasan and understand that a certain Mrs G would have had a firm hand in the Swami enjoying prime time and the spot light! He would stand with the programme hostess with two meek demonstrators – one male and one female in the front on two symmetric raised platforms. The Bramachari would instruct and they would follow. All of us, I think would remember the Padmasana and the Shavasan ( dead body aasan, which made me think, wow, now that’s easy – but how pray can it benefit anybody?) from then and it was probably the first exposure to Yoga we had. All this very well, but what really tickled us was all that bandage pushing and pulling out of the stomachs and the water pouring in and out of the nostrils. It made the programme somewhat in the league of – ripleys believe it or not, or the ‘I dare’ kind of programmes on AXN!!
Then there followed a spate of programmes as more and more transmitters were added in different states and cities. Colour TV came in in 1982 along with the Asiad games and a new trend of keeping up with the joneses started all over the country. You had to have colour! And these were curiously well rounded, chubby television sets.
We got out share of sitcom in Yeh Jo Hai zindagi which made Sofa-cum-bed a household name. I still kick myself for missing that episode. The whole world went sofa-cum-bed and giggle giggle, till I decided to go with the flow and also giggle. Until today, no one ever knew I missed the episode.
The much discussed and oft remembered Hum Log and Buniyaad followed. As did the “imported” programmes such as the mindless “fraggle rock” on Saturday afternoons, the Didi Comedy show. My favourite was “Telematch”, about those goofy country style games. But what made us truly believe in India Shining were the Grammy awards shown in the early 80s. I mean suddenly Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper, Stevie Wonder were our pals. The likes of us whose knowledge didn’t extend beyond Abba and Boney M until 1980, suddenly had posters of “Tears for Fears” and we were even in the know when they broke up and George Micheal came out with Father Figure. We Rocked! ( it was a big jump from watching Tops of the Pops every Saturday night and never getting to hear one number we recognized except if Abba came on with “chiquititi or “Voulez Vous”!). Sometime then Osi Bisa toured India and we even loved them and went Ojha hai Ojha with them happily! ( Okay fine, stop here and sing it if you want! Here’s help - Aroma kurva kurva kurva aroma kuruva).
The advertisements changed with the changing times. Karan Kapoor as the Bombay Dyeing Dream Lover took our breaths away, The Liril Girl was always surrounded by mystery ( everyone insisted she died on the way back from the shoot and no one ever questioned that fact. It was. That’s it ). The 7 Rs a pack of Nirma won the hearts of all housewives, and on the other hand you had Lalitha ji telling you where your cleverness and “samajhdaari” lies. You would kick yourself when you found yourself humming the catchy tune of the Carefree sanitary napkins ad! ( Now that I am a young girl…I can do the things I like…sic! ). Thums Up brought back the happy days and Campa Cola & Gold Spot made you believe life is an amusement park. Kapil Dev endorsed the Rapidex English speaking course and just because he was fresh back from the glory of winning the Prudential world cup for us we even overlooked the fact that he seemed to be needing it more than us!
One Ad that deserves a very big mention here is the Old Spice after shave ad. That surf and the haunting chorus came to be associated in our minds as the ultimate masculine symbol . I still associate the smell of Old Spice with teenage crushes and I can still identify it amongst a hundred smells. It can still make my head turn at airports and malls if I smell it.
Narottam Puri was to TV then what Harsha Bhogle is to Cricket now. He was the final authority on sports and all things sporty. Quizzing started with “Whats the good word” ( I remember a particular episode hosted by a highly bangled Dolly Thakore who jingled and jangled through out the programme!)
Sunday mornings were a date with Dr Spock and Captain Kirk which was followed by the various comedy serials one after the other. In the afternoons was the one about that totally demented Giant Robot, I can only remember it shooting missiles out of its wrist and his walk ( lopsided to the right and then to the left, throwing up smokes of dust) irritated me no end!
There came an era of Direct Telecasts. They did what they called a “Seedha prasaaran” from so many events. We related it to the Republic Day Parade with alternate English and Hindi commentaries and we would try and guess whether it was Neethi Ravindran or Minoo Talwar. If it was Hindi, it was sure to be either Salma Sultan or Mukta Srivastava. It was almost cute the way they stated the obvious – Giani Zail Singh getting off clumsily from the horse chariot would be “ab mananiye Rashrapati apni buggy se utar rahe hain” How it added to what we were seeing was something I didn’t understand – did they think we might deduce he was just a common man on Janpath on his regular mode of transport on a mildly rainy January morning?! All the same, the effort was marvelous and there was a joy and glory in watching each of the Tukdee march past the president.
Inspite of a widespread and strong belief that television spoilt the children and us having watched it sparingly as a result of that belief; those impressions have stayed stronger and gotten deeper in the years.
Thank you Doordarshan!
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