YEH DIWALI HOGI TV SOAPS WALI

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Actually it is ‘YEH DIWALI HOGI CUP WALI’, the punchline of Champions League T20. But such was the scenario in my house this diwali that it left me craving for each and every second of action. It was because grandma was home and with her arrived the vitriolic presence of TV soaps at prime time.
Whenever grandma is home, there is always an amiable tussle between cricket and the never ending saas-bahu drama with cricket always ending up on the losing side and me having to watch only when adds are being shown. Even then there is an incessant bickering to change the channel while I try in vain to explain that the amount of advertisements shown in between serials was so much that one can easily squeeze in two Brett Lee overs. And while the drama is on, I try hard to concentrate on the magazine in my hand but eyeballs turn effortlessly in the direction of TV and a few minutes of viewing brings a sardonic laughter inside me. In one scene ladies are discussing their sarees to be worn in that night’s function while I hoped for a messiah to make them realize that they are already dressed and jeweled well enough to attend a wedding.
Watching saas-bahu sagas is like watching a substandard Hindi movie where you can’t wait for ‘The End’ to flash. My mother doesn’t watch them and the praise for that goes to me. As a 9 year old child I had started watching ‘Kyunki Saas…..’ with my mother and I began posing to her vexing questions about why our ideal Indian bahu ‘Tulsi’ was being troubled by her saas. My mother realized the implications the serial was having on me and she has never seen anything like that on TV since.
Daily TV soaps maybe a form of entertainment for majority of households in India but their negative effects on children cannot be disregarded. Small children are adept at learning fast but cannot distinguish between good and bad. TV soaps may be showing both positive as well as negative characters but the villain being more flamboyant catches their eye. Same argument goes with movies but due to the perennial nature of these serials they are everyday hooked to the TV to check out the next move of their intriguing villain. The effect can vary from children enacting the villain to actually carrying out their moves.
So next time you see a small child glued to saas-bahu drama kindly change the channel. And the war between cricket and TV soaps still rages on at my home and I hope that at least for one day cricket wins. I also hope that you had a diwali free of TV serials.