K is for scapegoat

Almost a decade ago when I started out in television, channels experimented, producers were unafraid to stay rooted in reality, actors looked different from one another. Some shows worked, others didn’t, but despite a kind of rawness there was a more definite commitment to quality and an honest attempt to seek out new stories. A few years later, all of a sudden, producers and channels grew up and went straight from being infants — hungry for learning — to jaded middle-aged people who, to use the words of an American politician, were like “a tired, rich man who one day said to his chauffeur, ‘Drive off that cliff James, I want to commit suicide.’’’ Today a saas or a bahu or for that matter even a devar can walk out of the backdoor of one serial and enter through the front door of another and you won’t be able to tell the difference. A couple years ago I had approached a few channel heads with a proposal for a serial on true stories of female gangsters but was turned down because the idea was too dark and they said it would work only if I would compromise the realism and make the lives of these dangerous and erotic women more palatable to the middle-class. I believe today it’s even worse, where directors and writers are bluntly told by channel heads what the shows should say, do, and look like.

This blatant creative strangling is justified in the name of gathering TRPs which is the main concern of any television channel network. Of course, why shouldn’t it be? Without TRPs no channel can survive, but it’s not necessarily true that totally unrealistic, regressive, below average, cartoon-like family drama is the best way to earn high TRPs. Let us not fool ourselves into thinking that the captive female audience at home, for whom daily soaps have become a daily habit like our morning tea, actually loves us! Instead let’s give the women something really, really good for a change and then let’s watch what the TRPs behave like.

According to a survey, 50 out of every 100 women in Indian cities watch TV regularly. Can’t our entertainment reflect their pain, their longings, their beauty as well as their ugliness in any real way? Can we be 100 per cent sure that if we did do that they would switch their TV sets off? No we can’t, and while I don’t simplistically believe that television and movies have the power to either improve or destroy social values, I do think that rotten entertainment is a sign of a lazy people. And that’s where I would fault our producers, writers, directors. The major part of our television shows reek of lethargic minds, smiling over-confident smiles. There’s no attempt to re-educate ourselves, none to tread into brutal worlds that struggle with harsh realities, no new questions asked, and therefore no new truths discovered. Winston Churchill had said that, “a fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” Indian television has become fanatical about remaining conservative. It seems like our shows are by women, of women, but hardly for women. In fact the women who produce these shows are far stronger, more independent then the ones they fictionalise. And while I perfectly understand business dictates that force you to work within given guidelines — I myself put a love story in my first film even though it didn’t belong there because without a hero, the producer wouldn’t be able to sell it — I also know that the existing format can be pulled and stretched and it must be. In whatever manner possible, in small doses, the current social reality around us must percolate into our work, if we are to take any leaps forward.

Yes, most enduring works give hope and end in an affirmation of life. Although in a war-torn world it’s hard to believe in that, I realise that that’s central to the success of any TV show or film. And I guess it has reason to be, because even the most pathologically independent ones of us, somewhere deep within long to be happy and secure. Those of us who are 30 and are not yet married do still feel the need to be looked after — in our hearts at times there’s still the wish that someday if we were to be in financial, emotional, social trouble, there would be someone to stand by us. I’ve seen my mother and father live this truth out, how can I let that dream die within? And perhaps love may not have loved up to its promise but I have to believe that it exists. And as long as I believe in love’s healing power, saas-bahu tensions will persist, extra-marital affairs will continue to torment families, karva-chauths will go on, and hearts will be broken. As someone said, television is where the same joke is told to millions of people, they all laugh, but still remain lonely. When the gods haven’t been able to get rid of that, how can the “K” shows?

(The writer is a Mumbai-based filmmaker)