Knock, knock who8217;s there?

It is the evening of the night. Our hero is fast asleep in his crumpled kurta pyjama. The front door bell rings. He stumbles out of bed, ...

It is the evening of the night. Our hero is fast asleep in his crumpled kurta pyjama. The front door bell rings. He stumbles out of bed, opens the door and is confronted by the last person he imagined he would ever see Alpviram, Sony. In Wagle ki Duniya Star Plus it is well into early morning. Wagle, Wagle8217;s loving wife and the little girl who has been left to their tender mercies, are sleeping in the drawing room. Once again, the door bell tinkles, and Wagle waddles forward, opens the door and is confronted by precisely those people he had been expecting since the morning. Viva Las Vegas TNT: three people, including lead actress Ann Margaret, climb into a helicopter to follow the progress of Elvis Presley in the Las Vegas grand prix. As they settle into their seats, the man who will fly the machine yells out, 8220;Put on your safety belts.8221;

Why are these three perfectly inane scenes receiving such inordinate space? Hasn8217;t she got anything else to write about this week, you wonder.But wait on. You see what8217;s wrong, don8217;t you? In a city like Mumbai where there is more crime than honesty, the characters in serials 1 and 2 fling open their front doors like lovers do their welcoming arms especially in Hindi films. They never bother to peep through the spy hole even when there is one, they never ask, 8220;kaun hai?8221; before discovering who it is. But these days, people don8217;t open their front door in the middle of the night or day as though it was a fridgedaire. There8217;s a beast out there called CRIME which wants to feast inside our homes or hadn8217;t our TV producers noticed? They display a shocking disregard for verisimilitude. The practise of such verisimilitude can be helpful: people watching Viva8230; for example, learn lest they didn8217;t know, or were reminded lest they forgot, that you cannot take off in a helicopter without fastening your seat belt. Why, look at Thoda Hai Thodi ki Zaroorat Hai Sony, in other ways such a sensitive work: its doors and windows are wideopen. They have WELCOME/ENTER written all over them. A small detail, admittedly, but crucial because details lend authenticity.

Authenticity. Back to Thoda Hai8230; In last week8217;s episode, we finally learnt what happened to Vishal missing, presumed dead for two years. The doctor who saved him, recreates that evening during the Bombay riots, when she drove through the strife-torn city and discovered Vishal lying in the middle of the road. Here producer Rai had a choice: he could go the way Mahesh Bhatt and Mani Ratnam did in their films, Zakhm and Bombay and re-enact the violence in a graphic, dramatic way; or he could exercise considerable artistic restraint and merely hint at the forces which devastated the city. He chose the latter. There is a symbolic representation of the riots, mostly in the form of fires searing the streets.

Was this the ideal way to depict an event which so deeply scarred the city and the lives of the characters in the serial? Maybe. In this writer8217;s opinion the centralthemes of Thoda Hai.. are personal ones of time, loss and change and not public concerns. Still, it does freeze the blood to see the riots treated so casually.

So to Tanha Star Plus. What stands out is the acting 8212; almost uniformly good; what stands out is the music 8212; uniformly low key though irritatingly constant; what stands out is the pace 8212; uniformly military; what stands out is the number of stories 8212; uniformly too many. What damages the serial is that it is just a little too slow. Not uniformly but often. Last week, there was a conversation between Vijyendra Ghatge and Kruttika Desai on the meaning of dosti8216; which stretched once around the globe and back. By which time, to yawn perchance to sleep.

And in Saans STAR Plus, the inevitable or incredible has happened: the wife has taken back the errant husband 8212; for the sake of the children.

Actress-director Neena Gupta had always planned on the reunion but many viewers had hoped otherwise. They had wanted to seethe wife, strong stubbornly self-respecting and independent of the husband; they had wanted the wife to do what many in real life cannot dream of doing: leave the past and husband behind them to live a new future. But Gupta isn8217;t in the business of selling dreams; she peddles reality.