1

Close-Up

Shooting soldiers for a change

He took a simple, widely played game and a well-worn concept, and restructured them into two of the most popular shows on Indian television - Antakshari and Sa Re Ga Ma. And now, the soft-spoken and mild-mannered editor-director, Gajendra Singh has planted himself right into the hearts of tough Indian soldiers with Vijay Jyoti, the talk show dedicated to the Indian defence forces, on Zee TV.

The show, which has now switched slots from Sunday mornings to Tuesdays at 7.30 p.m., has completed 12 episodes and is getting an encouraging response from viewers, specially those from the Hindi belt - New Delhi, Lucknow and Madhya Pradesh.

The programme, which began airing from August 15, was inspired by the Kargil conflict and is being made in association with the ministry of defence. The basic aim behind making Vijay Jyoti, according to Gajendra Singh, “is to make an entertaining programme that focuses on the defence community, to glorify the defence services, to inform the masses about the various activities of the forces, to bridge the gap between civilians and the defence communities and to communicate to our jawans that wherever they are, they have our support.”

The brainchild of Major (retd.) Ashok Kaul, the show is divided into three segments: The Defence Community, The Celebrity and From The Field, a format which Singh says took him ten days to work out.

In the first segment, people from the defence forces are invited to the studio. These could be families of officers or jawans who have lost their lives in any one of the wars, a widow of an officer who’s been honoured with the Paramvir Chakra, a young cadet from the NDA, a senior officer from any one of the defence services or a family in which all the children have chosen the services as career.

The aim of this segment, says Singh, “is to bring out the various emotional, practical, informative and inspirational aspects of the defence community as the anchors talk to the guests and try to explore a particular issue related to their lives.”

The Celebrity segment has a celebrity who has earned recognition in his or her field and who can interact with the guests of the first segment and with millions of people of the defence community. The celebrities are selected in such a way that their presence compliments the guests of the first segment.

But the most interesting and exciting segment of this show is From The Field as this section lets up a peep into the lives of the defence community through the camera - observing their moods and actions in their own environment, recording the hardships of their tasks and their spirit of enthusiasm. This section does not have a set pattern and largely depends on the kind of footage the team gets while shooting.

“There is always an effort to record as many variables as possible - in terms of interaction with officers, jawans, their various activities on the fronts, their modes of entertainment, their concerns, beliefs, superstitions, their messages and letters and their farmaish (request) of songs,” explains the director.

Other than these broad segments, the programme has special additions once in a while. For example, a short dramatised sequence helps in opening or closing an episode. The programme has two pairs of anchors, one on the field (Raghuvir Yadav and Mita Vasisht) and the other (Ashish Vidyarthi and Divya Dutta) in the studio, interacting with the audience and the guests.

However, in spite of the overwhelming public support for the defence forces during the Kargil conflict, Vijay Jyoti, has not been able to generate the kind of response from the viewers that Antakshari and Sa Re Ga Ma have.

Although Singh does admit that this is true, he says that it is a different kind of a programme and therefore it is unfair to compare it with his two music-based shows. “But it is doing pretty well and is getting massive feedback from the viewers,” he claims. “In fact, it is doing much better than I expected it to and I am confident that it will do even better. After all, only 12 episodes of the show have been telecast so far,” he points out. He also claims that even though Kargil is no longer under the media glare, this has not affected the audience response to the show.

Who said patriotism is old fashioned?

AL Chougule