Of Soaps and Handkerchiefs..

Our home is a soap-free zone. Now don’t raise your handkerchiefs to your nose. I am not talking about the soap that is a cleaning agent, but the soap operas that have become staple of every Indian household, irrespective of caste, creed, economic status etc!!

Our servants may lack money for food as the month-end draws closer, but the first thing they do with their salaries is to pay the cable guy his monthly rental.

My days of TV watching ended at about the same time satellite TV came into picture. Weekly serials with a story to tell were slowly replaced with half an hour episodes of crying, cursing and avenging. My mother became something of a social outcast amongst our relatives since she was the only one who appeared clueless about the difficulties faced by ‘Saro’ of ‘Metti Oli’ (a very popular tamil soap).

If we ever bother to enter a friend/relative’s house at 7:00pm or later we are spoken to like the characters in K.Balachander’s* movies.

Hindi soaps are equally and often more scary. I remember one day when I was visiting my friend who was staying at the Hyderabad guest house. She was watching some K soap with the guest-house cooks. The she-villain in the serial looked really scary, but wore some really expensive clothes and jewelery and even had a signature tune that played in the background every time she appeared on screen. She had some name ending with ‘ika’. (All these years I kept thinking the name was Kaapalika or Andolika, but my friend said it was Komolika!)

Well coming back to what I actually wanted to say - After a long long time, I was forced to watch/hear a soap, thanks to a visit from my aging relatives. True to our time-honored maxim - Athhithi Devo Bhava (Guest is God), my father changed the channel to the one playing the latest version of Ramayan. And my childhood nightmares returned.

It is interesting how some things never change !! No, I don’t mean the story of Ramayan itself, but the way our serial makers (or should I say serial killers?) dramatize it!! Some noteworthy points :

a. Sita and Ram still look well fed after 13 years of living in the jungle eating roots and fruits.

b. Ravan is still the same silly guy who laughs aloud for no reason. He seems to think he is intimidating - we don’t !!

c. The concept of time is taken very literally by the directors. When a person walks from point A to point B that is about 200 m away, the scene stretches for about the same time as it would take in real life to walk that distance.

d. However this concept is forgotten when a war sequence is shown. The guys separated by about 50 m shoot arrows at each other. The arrows take a few minutes to reach the other end or worse still collide with the other arrow. I remember the sequence where Ram had to lift the bow in King Janaka’s court, in the Ramanand Sagar version. That week’s episode consisted of showing a court full of kings who had come to break the bow and ended with the 3rd or 4th failed attempt. The next week’s episode had Lord Ram walking to the box where the bow is kept, standing near it and then ‘Mangal bhavan amangal..’ while the credits rolled. It took about 4 episodes for Ram to walk to the bow, lift it and finally break it !!The serial made award winning Malayalam and Bengali movies (of those days) seem like James Bond movies !!

e. Besides the slow-motion, Ramanand Sagar’s version had some hilarious advertisements for crackers in these sequences. The arrows would frequently collide mid-air and give rise to some colorful stuff!! While I was spared of the war sequences in the episode I heard more than saw (I had my back turned to the TV to escape from visual assault!!), I heard the bad guys planning an assault and harping on the same point from the start of the episode to the end.

f. Hanuman still looks constipated. But what else can you expect from the poor guy who has some contraption on his mouth preventing him from emoting in any manner? (P.S. I recently read Valmiki Ramayan and Hanuman is described as a very handsome person!!)

g. The music director seems to still take his job very seriously. He considers it his paramount duty to compensate for the lack of acting by the actors by giving appropriate mood music for different scenes. Thus if the hero’s mother offers him rice and he says he wants roti, our MD gets emotional and plays a music that would in pre-soap days make you think that the hero’s mother kicked the bucket.

h. The guy playing Ram still seems to think that smiling and looking like a complete moron makes him look noble. He seems to have taken his (non-) acting lessons from Arun Govil!!

i. Sita is still well made up in Ashoka vanam. Make-up probably grows on the trees of that forest!!

j. The villains still talk too much !! They keep saying what they will do, where as the good guys kill them in the end without too much talk.

k. It was very difficult not to shudder while listening to the voices of the characters. The tamizh dubbed version was playing on TV and I have heard the same male and female voices mouthing pretty much the same type of dialogues in ads and other serials that one comes across while switching channels.

Miracles happen once in a while to re-inforce one’s belief in God. Similarly chance viewings such as the one yesterday made me realize what I was not missing in my life - TV soaps !!

*K.B is a very very famous tamil film director in Tamizhnadu. Many of his characters have this habit of looking at the mirror or some obscure object while talking to another character !!

Hey You, Meet You !!

Intro 1 - A conversation with a friend of many years:
‘So what are you reading these days?’

‘I have suddenly developed an interest for classics. Thankfully the public library is not short of books by old masters. I have just started Tolstoy’s War and Peace. What about you?’

‘Me? It has been a while since I read any novels, but the last one I read was one by Frederick Forsyth. What about movies? What was the last one you saw?’

‘I discovered this site called filmsite.org a month back. It has a list of the top 100 English movies of all times. I am thinking of watching them one by one.’

‘Hmm.. Why are you like this?’

‘Like what??’

‘Well, why do you have to read classics and watch B&W movies? Do you really like them? I personally think that you are doing it because you think it is the right thing to do and not because you like it! Why are you not normal? Why do you strive so hard to be different? Why can’t you be like normal girls? Normal girls your age, would listen to film music or popular music, but you pretend to enjoy classical music!! They would watch what everyone else watches, not some obscure movies from the archives! What are you trying to prove and to who? Why are you restricting yourself? Why don’t you be more open and broad-minded?’

Intro 2 - Another casual conversation with a short-term friend:

‘So tell me this - Are you a vegetarian by choice? Or is it because of your upbringing?’

‘It was initially because of my upbringing. Now it is also a matter of choice.’

‘And why is it your choice now? Religion? Ethical reasons?’

‘Ethical reasons’

‘See, this is my problem with vegetarians. Why do you say ethical reasons? Why don’t you say that you do not like meat?’

‘What is the problem? You asked me why I did not eat meat and I gave you an honest answer!!’

‘No, but what you are doing is wrong !! You are making a non-vegetarian like me feel bad about myself for eating meat, by giving such an answer. You vegetarians, think you are morally superior to us !! We are human too!! We have feelings too!!’

‘Are you, by any chance, drunk or stoned? Whoever talked anything about you? You asked me a question and I replied !!’

‘But you should be nicer when you respond to such questions. If someone asks you why you are a vegetarian, you can simply say that its your choice! Why do you want say that it is due to ethical reasons? Do you mean to imply that being a non-vegetarian is unethical?’

What is common between the 2 exchanges above? Note how the questions were framed. What were the responses and what meanings were construed? Most people hear what they want to hear! The opinion about you or the subject is already formed and what they want is a mere confirmation, which they will derive irrespective of what your actual response is. The questions are merely rhetorical and are supposedly intended to prove to you what a hypocrite you are !!

Though not many, I have met a few such people in life. I can understand this sort of exchange happening with people you do not know very well, but sometimes, it is the ‘friends’ and ‘well-wishers’ who often end up annoying you in ways mentioned above.

Sometimes these ‘illuminating’ comments tend to destroy your self-esteem, especially when you are young. During my school days, I got into a quarrel with a boy in my class. The fight was pointless like most fights between kids. We were kids entering adolescence. During that short period, girls and boys hated each other and insulted each other at every possible instance. Things turned a little dramatic, when this boy and few of his friends sent home an abusive post card with choice expletives, complete with spelling and grammar mistakes (I was even called a ‘bloody bucket’ in the letter !!). My parents were upset and complained to the school principal who then asked the class teacher to give a stern warning to the culprits.

These were boys and as I had mentioned before, we had a beast who worked as the Sports teacher. He got involved in the issue too and supposedly gave the boys a sound beating (heresay). This was when my class teacher realized that she had to teach ME a lesson for provoking the boys. So I suddenly became a student who needed to be corrected. During one class, the teacher started talking about how people should behave. She spoke about a fictional person, who was good in academics and co-curricular activity, who belonged to a certain community (trust me, this happens in small-town schools in TN) and who was popular in school. But, she said, these things did not matter if she was vain. (Pride, I was told later, is when a girl of any age talks back to a guy of any age!!). The only thing she did not mention during the entire speech was my name! The entire class was now looking at me, for no one was fooled that the advice was meant for the whole class.

The issue did not end there. She supposedly asked to see my younger sister and asked her about my general behaviour at home, was I friendly with my father and my brother etc. My sister innocently told her that I would often fight with my brother. That is when the teacher told my sister something that I had not known all along - that I had always had a hatred towards men :) I was young and eager to please everyone around, especially my teachers. And this teacher affected me so badly that for the remaining years at school and college, I refused to participate in any extra-curricular activities. My self-esteem went for a complete toss, and I started believing that I was one of the most despicable people put on earth. I would tremble when I had to stand in front of people and had a few experiences of losing my voice totally when facing the mike.

Today, I find it easier to brush aside comments made by people about what I actually meant while saying anything. But as I said before, it still comes as a shock when people who you think you know well, still offer opinions about what they really think you meant!! Sometimes, it is better when people take you at face-value rather than try to find hidden meanings in every word you say or every action you do !!