Opinion Children playing dress-up
The dangers of well-intentioned,do-gooding soap operas
Its time to say goodbye to good intentions. Its just not good enough to say: television entertainment is doing good by tackling serious social issues such as child marriage,female infanticide,colour and caste barriers,class discrimination,farmer suicides,and so on and so forth. After watching most TV serials,any of them,on any given evening,you sense the seriousness is just a bluff.
So lets call their bluff. Lets watch Balika Vadhu (Colors),not because it is the only bluff-master around,but because it was the one we liked to watch most and the one whose success set off this obsession with doing good. Last Friday was young Anandis last appearance before she took a big leap forward,and rejoined us on Monday five years older (shes now around 17),with a new actress taking over the role from the winsome Avika Gor.
For those not in the picture,Balika Vadhu is about the life and times of a child bride,Anandi,in Rajasthan. Throughout Fridays episode,there was a great deal of (unnecessary) crying. Anandi cried,her mother cried,her husband cried in fact,anyone close to her was in tears. They had their reasons of course: Anandi is living with her parents,separated from husband Jagdish,something she cannot bear. Nor can Jagdish. So what does he do? He disappears from home one fine day and sets off to visit his wife.
As he nears her village,he begins to run,shouting out her name; that echoes across the desert and reaches Anandi,dressed up like a doll,who gazes out at the vast expanse of the sand dunes,sees a moving dot on the horizon and identifies it as her lord and master. Then she,too,begins to run.
It is such a lyrical moment. There he is running towards her,rather like Shah Rukh Khan does in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai,there she is running towards him,rather like Kajol does towards SRK in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge. Theres the sun-kissed desert between them,the lilting music,love is in the air. Finally,theyre face to face. They hug,or embrace,clutching on to each other as though they will never let go,all the while crying copiously.
Before this can go any further,his wicked uncle arrives and yanks him away,separating them once again. Jags looks back at Anandi,sadness and yearning battling for ascendancy in his expression; she returns his look,longingly,alone in the sand.
Its all so touching and heartrending,and it would be very tragic and romantic if this was Romeo and Juliet or the Hindi film equivalent. But this is about two young children who have been married before puberty behaving like young lovers. Dont they remind you of the kids on the talent shows who imitate adults?
If a serial about child marriage becomes a Hindi film then you can write anything you want in the fine print against this social evil,but to the viewer,it looks very,very attractive. Anandi always looked gorgeous,Jagdish was boyish-baby faced,his parents loving and giving. If only Dadisa would go away,life would be wonderful for the child bride.
Watching the serial,every evening at home,we tend to suspend disbelief. We become so intimately involved with the characters that we forget we are watching a young boy and girl in a marriage situation. We begin to react to them like they are characters in any other soap. Thats the danger of these well-intentioned serials.
Moving on: the Sohrabuddin tapes on Times Now,Monday and Tuesday may indeed provide clinching evidence in the Sohrabuddin case but frankly,for the average viewer,the conversations were incomprehensible,and we spent most of our time staring at the ceiling.
And if Mani Shankar Aiyar is at all unhappy about the Commonwealth Games,he manages to conceal it. On NDTV 24×7 and Times Now,Tuesday night,he looked like he was enjoying himself hugely at the expense of everyone else. Ha,ha.
shailaja.bajpai@expressindia.com
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