http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/08/03/stories/2008080350100300.htm
Media Matters
Stories that sell
SEVANTI NINAN
With the focus shifting to small town India and its women, most
channels seem to be betting on sagas of young women and mythologicals.
Small town India, its women in particular, have to be entertained.
Since there are at least three dozen others competing to do that,
between Hindi and other regional entertainment channels, the search
for fresh ideas can take some bizarre turns. So we've had serials on
dusky brides ("Saat Phere"), brides who are actually goddesses
("Devi") and now we're into child brides. Colours, the new
entertainment channel launched with much fanfare from the Viacom and
Network 18 stable, is trying to do a winsome spin on a custom that the
laws of land are trying to stamp out.
"Balika Vadhu" (Child Bride) is cleverly crafted. There is rural India
dressed up to radiate earthy charm, there are good looking parents
stomping around in their lehengas, ghunghats and turbans and speaking
an extremely folksy Hindi, and there is a chubby child bride all set
to be married off until a pesky school teacher intervenes. Since this
is no me-too channel, there are no caricatures here. Each character is
nicely etched and evolves with each episode. Though conflicting, the
logic of opposing stands on the issue of child marriage is
persuasively presented. And to counter the charge of glamorising
regressive practices, it uses the teacher to present all the arguments
against child marriage including the fact that it is illegal.
The complete spectrum
Since the programmes on this new general entertainment channel run
such an amazing gamut from the usual got-to-get-daughter-married fare
to the Bond-ish line up of daring beauties for "Khatron ka Khiladi",
the channel's chief executive explains its scheduling logic: "Our
prime time band will be 7-11 p.m. of which 7-9 p.m. will be for the
small towns. The 10-11 p.m. time band will be for the metro viewers.
For us, all viewers are important."
Indeed. So the small towns get to see, in addition to "Ballika Vadhu",
something called "Bandhan Saath Janmon Ka" (The burden of seven
births, presumably previous) which is essentially the saga of a fond
mother, anxious father, scheming aunt, and a fluttering young thing
who so badly wants to study, but... It is ostensibly set in Lucknow,
with shots of Lucknow railway station to establish that. The young
heroine of this saga too wants to study, while her father want to see
her married. (Progressive fathers who have been saving up to send
their daughters abroad to study, are strictly for the ads).
It's got to a stage where a channel would be really brave if it
decided to set a story around the ambitions of a young man for a
change. On the two channels which launched earlier, NDTV Imagine and
9X, it is much the same mix: sagas of young women coupled with
mythologicals. Mothers and aunts tend to have their heads covered,
mother-in-law tyranny is sometimes masked, sometimes out in the open,
and of course, no mother of a ready-to-be-married daughter looks more
than 35 years old. Presumably they were all child brides.
You've got choice
Could this terribly varied and imaginative approach to designing
entertainment have something to do with the fact all these channels
have for their head honchos men who've come out of Star India's
stable? Colours included. One channel is running "Ramayan", another
"Mahabharat", and the new one "Krishna".
It's interesting what a completely switchover takes place at 10 p.m.
Akshay Kumar's version of Fear Factor seems to have gone down well
with India, metro or otherwise. He's good, and the women are
attractive and a game bunch, for the most part. Yana Gupta, Pooja Bedi
and Aditri Gowarikar add the glamour. There are beauties, stunts and
creepy crawlies. Since they've already been through some scary stunts
and the creepy crawlies have run the gamut from cockroaches and
earthworms to frogs and mice, the shock quotient should begin to pall
sooner rather than later.
In the end, the question that remains is what constitutes
entertainment. Empathy or escapism, vicarious horror or pleasure, or
traditional story telling which the whole family can watch? The
characters in Krishna are caricatures in some sense, but you can't
help watching them. In a country where there is little homogeneity,
mythologicals have become unifiers with an irrefutable market logic.
And across the Hindi belt, the aspirational young daughter, whether
she just wants to go to college or buy her parents a bigger car, is a
growing media cliché that evidently sells.
