Can Khanna cope with the tube?
Rajesh Khanna was lost in memories of another day. He was thinking about the times when he and his wife (Prabha Sinha) were thinking of adopting a baby. But that never happened. What’s happening now is a serial called Ittefaq which has Khanna doing a Thodisi Bewafaai with Sinha instead of Shabana Azmi and an Amar Deep with his screen-brother who looks up to Big Brother like one would to God. That isn’t hard to do when your co-star used to be God in his heydays.

Bade Bhaiyya sat drinking and reminiscing all alone in the lawn. Soon the ‘lawn’ ranger was joined by the sulking sibling. Experienced in those matters Bade Bhaiyya immediately sensed something amiss. He made grinning inquiries about the Miss. "Bhaiyya, I want Rs. 5,000 to buy her a present." Bhaiyya being Rajesh Khanna (and therefore grandly generous, aristocratically lavish) retorted, "Why Rs. 5,000? Give her a gift worth Rs. 50,000 or Rs. 5 lakhs."

The next morning Divya Dutta received a bicycle which she seems glad enough to accept. So I guess her relationship with the tycoon’s brother is ‘bike’ where it used to be. Now that the once-awesome Khanna has made a come-bike, it remains to be seen how well he copes with the changeover from the Mercedes medium to the medium of bicycles.

Not everyone is as comfortable with the transition from the big to small screen as Amitabh Bachchan. A fabulous rhetorician like Shatrughan Sinha was flop as a talk show host and as a soap-star in a serial that he did on DD’s Metro channel a couple of years ago. The way the Big B handled the rather strange man from Bihar on Kaun Banega Crorepati, assuaging his proletarian nerves by breaking into the Bihari boli, offering him water to calm him down and a brief break to wipe away his tears, is proof of an extraordinary showmanship of the kind has never experienced on Indian television.

We have our own share of self-styled showmen on television, like Alyque Padamsee who virtually took over the floor on BBC’s Question Time India last week. In a newly do-or-‘dye’ look Padamsee looked dapper and ready for the kill. "We’ve got to face the fact that America is supreme," he asserted while the ceaselessly cynical Suhasini Ali sneered from the sidelines. "We went overboard," she observed disgustedly about our response to Bill Clinton’s visit some time ago. If you have personalities like Padamsee and Ali in a talk show, you can never go wrong.

Kuch Ret Kuch Pani on DD2 is interestingly plotted. Aakash Khurana and his daughter return to India to lay claims to the ancestral property. Daughter is determined to get to the bottom of her mother’s suicide. Papa Khurana dissuades the girl. "The people around here will drive a wedge between us." One of the women indulging in wedge-tarian activities is played by the Gujarati actress Arpna Mehta who plays Tulsi’s mother-in-law in the increasingly popular Kyonki Saas Bhi Bahu Thi.

Last week, Saas came into Beta Mihir and Bahu Tulsi’s room asking for some money. "Why do you need to ask?" Mihir laughed, and left, leaving the Saans and Bahu alone to a skirmish of supremacy. Tulsi willingly handed over the cupboard keys to her mother-in-law but demanded to know how much money she had taken. "My son has never asked me for a hisaab, hissed the mother-in-law. Bahu Tulsi’s smirk expanded. "Now your son is going to ask you for hisaab."

The sequences between the warring pair are cleverly written to accentuate the divisions between the teacher and the ‘taut.’ While the new Bahu teaches her scheming but not incurably evil mother-in-law (in other words,not Lalita Pawar) lessons, she never crosses the line of decorum. This is like Mandira Bedi in that ad for kitchen masala where she makes pao-bhaaji pretending to listen to her mother-in-law’s instruction while grooving to her walkman all the while, or the ad for the refrigerator where Tabu pretends to have got taazi sabzi from the market for her freshness-fixated mother-in-law.

Mutinous but not indecorous, that’s what makes Tulsi in Kyonki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi such a favourite. It’s so pathetic to see well known names from the cinema slumming it out on sitcoms. Raj Sippy who made some meritorious films in the 1970s is doing Zindagi Mil Ke Bitayenge on DD2. Like Rajesh Khanna in Ittefaq, Kiran Kumar stars as the Bade Bhaiyya of his family. His clan consists of an unpleasant and unlikeable semi-moronic siblings. When they all land up in Mumbai from the village the first thing that Bade Bhaiyya does is bang into Ranjeet’s car.

Then they ransack a bungalow while real estate agent Kavita Kapoor looks on as though she had just seen Manisha Koirala on Sawaal Dus Crore Ka. Then the youngest sibling (played by the child who was Hrithik Roshan’s brother in Kaho Na Pyar Hai) pees on a stranger’s head who accepts the unseasonal shower like manna from heaven. So farce so crude. By now, Sippy who made a very funny film called Satte Pe Satta and its fairly funny sequel Ikke Pe Ikka, expects us to fall out of our chair laughing.

Nothing is sadder than the sight of a cinema reject eking out a presence on television. Ravi Kissen who played one of Sridevi’s co-stars in Army, is Ranjeet’s bumbling assistant on Zindagi Mil Ke Bitayenge.

B4U featured an interview with singer Sapna Awasthi. Nothing wrong with that. Except that she mentioned Dhadkan as a favourite film and praised Sunil Shetty’s performance to the skies. That was the cue for the entire song Tum dil ki dhadkan mein rehti ho. Thank God, Awasthi didn’t mention Ghar aaja mera pardesi as her favourite, or else we would have had nine minutes of irrelevant footage.

Space fillers are all very well. But sometimes they resemble outerspace-fillers. There was a joke on B4U that went, "What do you call a star son who reviews movies?" The answer: "Critic Roshan"! Kaho na bekaar hai!

>>>Subhash K Jha