Daily soap,
The new mantra
Daily-dallying seems to be the new mantra for success on television. Every channel worth anything has a daily soap at different times of the day. While DD2’s Dushman on the new 9-Gold band is fairly ho-hum, B4U’s Papa about a householder (Kiran Kumar) who suddenly brings an illegitimate daughter home has shades of Shekhar Kapur’s Masoom and the recent Kiron Kher tearjerker Khandaan on Sony. But the inimitable Raman Kumar - Vinta Nanda team gives the familiar tale their own spin.

A tale doing its own spiralling spin is Zee’s Babul Ki Duwayen Leti Jaa. The four female protagonists have only one thing on their minds: how to find the right spouse. In the bid to outdo one another by look or by crook the chaar deviyan wear too much makeup and make too many faces to look convincing as middleclass girls. Last week, there was a potentially powerful dramatic sequence when the ordinary working class papa visited a prospective groom’s home and was bombarded by the most obscene materialism on this side of Judaai.

Daughter played along on the dinner table. "We eat out every Sunday. We love Thai food. We generally go to the Thai Pavillion," she improvised to impress her could-be’s family, while her father stared into his plate with zombie-like concentration. The broken man finally spoke up. "Is it all right if I eat with my fingers?" Everyone at the table looked relieved. Maybe they were thinking of the cutlery they won’t have to wash. Or maybe they were thinking of the next episode.

Later the material girl’s immaterial father sobbed to his wife, "I can’t remember the last time I took all of you out for dinner. And she says we go out every week." Scenes from a middleclass family, rendered at an incredibly high pitch.

S ab TV’s night-crap, sorry, night-cap Sukanya is written by Shobha De. That explains why there are no hidden dimensions in the story. Sukanya is a smalltown girl from Calicut who’s poor and cultured. Ananya is her uncouth and rich cousin in Mumbai where Ms Butter-won’t-melt-in-the-mouth Sukanya arrives to seek her fortunes. Ananya bitches. Sukanya smiles. Ananya conspires to take away her prestigious modelling assignment. . Sukanya forgives. She almost loses her place at the IIT. But there’s not a whimper of protest about the pampered and spoilt girl’s misconduct.

Even Cinderella would be shamed by Sukanya’s goodness. The serial’s stereotypes are so broad, they make us squirm in our seats. Is this the same Shobha De who once wrote the stylish and resonant Swabhimaan? And is that director Anil Ganguly’s daughter Rupali playing the title role? It is, it is. And she also plays Vishal Singh’s dead much-missed beloved in Sony’s Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin. She better learn to move some facial muscles if she wants to do her father who made wonderful films like Kora Kaagaz and Tapasya, proud.

B4U’s Khushi is about a mom, played by Lillette Dubey who burns up with envy when her friend finds a suitable husband for her daughter. The lady storms home and falls on her mother-in-law (played by Seema Bhargava who must be the same age as Ms Dubey) like a ton of bricks, asking why the girl’s Dadaji isn’t worried about the marriageable girl in the family. Now that Ms Dubey’s hawk eyes have spotted Bijoy Chowdhary (whose dreams of big-screen stardom have evaporated) she won’t rest until her daughter is in the mandap.

What’s this new obsession with marriage doing on television? Is it a reflection of middleclass neurosis? Or just a formula to flaunt the trappings of wedding festivities on the small screen? What a relief to come across a serial where there are no weddings in sight. Parmeet Sethi stars as a grieving widower and father in wife Archana Puran Singh’s Hum Bhi To Hai Tumhare. Being a home production, Sethi (who like Bijoy Chowdhary became a household name doing Lekh Tandon’s serial Kurukshetra) gets loads of closeups where he looks suitably pained. Unfortunately, nothing Sethi does can express our pain at the pure puerility of the feeble fable.

Last week, the minute Kabeer(Sethi) walked into his favourite church and orphanage, a couple of people walked in with a baby in arm. It was the only survivor in the plane crash that took away his wife and two children. Oh wow, even the Gods can’t arrange life as meticulously as our over-busy writers on television.

Permeet me to laugh at life’s cruel ironies, turned into a cruel joke by our television soaps. In the same episode of Hum Bhi To Hain Tumhare (the hit Adnan Sami-classic song is all that’s attractive in this soap) a mother sobbingly resisted her husband’s efforts to give over their son to Kabeer for adoption.

At around the same time that evening a grieving mother on Sony’s daily-chalo event Ek Mahal Ho Sapano Ka was heard scolding her workaholic husband about their son’s death. "How would you know how it feels? Where you around when he took his first step? Did you know his favourite colour, food? Were you around when he said Papa for the first time?"

By the time she finished the ploughed Papa looked like a staunch believer in family planning. All this family-sham-ily business is coming out of our eyes.

Even Rajesh Khanna is busy doing Avatar all over again in B4U’s Apne Paraye. The serial about a lovable tycoon not only revolves around the exiled superstar, it virtually fawns at his feet. All the characters in the sloppily produced serial gaze adoringly at Khanna as he fills them with words of wisdom. When on his birthday his screen son (played by cine-reject Vikas Bhalla) presented him with an expensive watch he looked at the thing and sighed, "Whether the watch is worth 200 rupees or 2 lakhs, it still tells time."

The same logic cannot be applied to the small and big screen. Making the descent from a 2-lakh medium to a 200-rupee one just doesn’t suit a legend like Rajesh Khanna.


>>>Subhash K Jha