How MTV changed my life

Yes. There really was only so much one could do. Buzzwords like liberalisation and globalisation were just beginning to appear, and private TV channels became an everyday fix. Cable TV was slowly becoming the fashionable thing in small-town India, a perfect middle-class counterpoint to the safari-suit-and- pomeranian superiority of the elite. My professor parents, of course, thanks to their worldview and wisdom nurtured by Brahminical leanings, had strong opinions on any form of unsupervised entertainment. Exactly the reason why I readily agreed when Ramkailasji, my trusted aide and the family Man Friday, recommended that we steal the cable connection since the wires went through our house.

Till then, our experience in thievery was restricted to pocketing raw mangoes of the awesomely juicy Maldah variety from the neighbours’ yard. So, I was not too sure. Having said that, the lure of breaking the boredom and seeing content outside of the staid DD programming was too much. The programming options were many, beyond the Krishi Darshans and Chitrahaars of the world. There was finesse and flair one wasn’t used to seeing on television. Plus, there was MTV. That thing that was meant to morally corrupt the youth of the nation.

I was ready to be corrupted.

All it took was a pair of garden cutters and some ingenuity, and we were a cable TV household between 10pm and 5am, opening the gates to a hitherto unseen world. The firang accent, the cool graphics, the smart promos, the interesting shows — they were all from a distant land. There was Star Plus with The Crystal Maze, Donahue, Oprah and, oh, those kissing cousins in The Bold and The Beautiful. Or the cigarette-smoking Tara in the eponymous series on Zee TV, and even the obnoxious Mohan Kapoor on the channel’s Saanp Seedi, and Rajat Sharma giving birth to a different breed of journalism in Aap Ki Adalat. This was all different. New. And real.

And then there was, of course, MTV.

With its funky graphics, bizarre spots and fast pace. It smelled like teen spirit. With Michael Jackson and Madonna. With Guns N’ Roses, a paradoxical co-existence that could well define MTV. With Right Said Fred declaring sexiness and Phil Collins his inability to dance. With Pearl Jam, Megadeth, Metallica and innumerous such bands that us small-towners had no knowledge of. I saw images I never thought existed. I saw people I never could be. I saw love. I saw debauchery. It was culturally alien at times. But it was all eye-opening. I could never be them, I knew. And yet, I wanted to know more about them.

I saw possibilities. And I am not just talking television. I am talking life.

For that Hindi-medium boy from Bihar struggling with itihaas, bhugol and nagrik shastra in school, it was almost like creating his own history every night by unshackling himself from all that was around him. By thinking beyond the books and course material. By taking those fantastic flights to nowhere. I never did stop thinking in Hindi. I did not develop an accent. I never could appreciate Pearl Jam, Megadeth or Metallica. I did not try becoming a different person with brand new reference points. Only, my perspective changed. I started seeing things differently. I did not know where I wanted to go, but I knew what it would be like.

We were caught soon enough by Papa. He was obviously upset. He said all we had to do was ask. But I wasn’t complaining. It was worth the trip. It is not as if it suddenly changed my persona or that I could see doors opening for me. But the entire visual experience, day on day, made me realise that there were so many doors that existed.

It was not just economic libera lisation at work, or just liberalisation. It was liberation!

It changed my outlook. It made me more confident, more audacious. It allowed me to dream differently. That gawky teenager, son of professor parents, started looking beyond engineering and medicine as a career, as did many of us from similar backgrounds. Everything in the world, hitherto unseen, was now around us. And everything was achievable. We did not have to travel to foreign lands to broaden our horizons. The world had come to us in the form of Camay soaps and Hershey’s chocolates. Brand new malls and multiplexes. In the queues at McDonald’s. Buzzing on pagers and mobile phones. Surprisingly, none of it made me feel poor and deprived at any point of time. It kept egging me to have a deeper resolve to become better off (read, rich).

In retrospect, that was the crudest, and yet the most important, contribution of liberalisation to small-town India, and not just to me. We stopped feeling guilty about earning and spending money, something that Papa would not have approved of. We were okay to let go of our middle-classery. Of course, that came with its own set of struggles. Mumbai, the city I had chosen to move to, gave me its perfumed indifference, showing me my place in the 8:11 local. I gave it my unadulterated confidence. Very soon, we reached a compromise and the city was home.

Fate brought me to MTV in 2000. And MTV gave me the confidence to change it. It had made me embrace its globalness, I made it embrace my Indianness, being a part of the team that made it desicool. I worked with them for 10 long years, fancy designation, et al. Little did MTV know about the role it had played in my life. Even when it was on mute.

Meanwhile, we got Ramkailasji a job as a peon in Delhi. His family continued to be in a remote village in Bihar. We sponsored the education of his son who is now 16. The boy uses a smartphone and uses WhatsApp. I suspect he also knows how to order mangoes online. Only, he aspires to follow the career path of his father: become a peon.

Twenty-five years later, I wait for another round of liberalisation.