Soap bubbles

Producing a TV serial is much easier than making a movie, provided you have a firm conviction that all your viewers will have no sense of logic. Then, you do not need a lot of funds since in this trade you earn in the form of ads as you spend on production. You do not need a costly star cast as family soaps are not star-based but story- or suspense-based. Any handsome young man with muscles to show, or a fair-complexioned girl with a well-contoured figure, will serve the purpose. When any actor leaves or is shunted out, the director has to merely display on the screen that, henceforth, the role of such and such character will be played by so and so.

When Satyajit Ray got his Oscar for his lifelong services to cinema, the representatives of so-called mainstream cinema complained that he had only displayed poverty and filth in India. Present-day family soap makers have completely washed away all that poverty and filth. The families live in the grandeur of palatial houses with breathtaking furnishing and separate rooms for a large number of couples.

The star cast in a family soap has to be big since you have to show characters of all shades, from the pitch black to the grey or the snow white. The story line fuses the melodrama of the Undivided Hindu Family business with household intrigue, opulent parties and clubs, elaborate religious rituals 8212; in fact, with everything under the sun. The snow-white character is the eldest lady of the household who is devoutly religious and is respected by everybody or the eldest bahu to whom she hands over the bunch of keys, indicating her status as the lady of the household.

The pitch-dark character is generally a bhua father8217;s sister or a nanad husband8217;s sister though married symbolised by an inverted family planning sign in red on the forehead. But the bhua or nanad invariably lives in her parents8217; household and not with her in-laws. The phoopha bhua8217;s husband or a nandoyee nanad8217;s husband is rarely shown in the episode. This too reduces the cost of production as phuphas and nandoyees do not come free of cost!