I’ve been in Bangalore for close to two and a half years now and have spent almost all of it living alone as a paying guest with another family. For this entire period I’ve lived without a television.
Growing up in Delhi, when I was with my family, TV was an important part of our lives. Dinner was incomplete if the TV wasn’t running though we were not as TV-crazy as some other families, primary reason being none of us was an Ekta Kapoor fan. After dinner, I would generally watch the 10’o clock news on NDTV with Rajdeep Sardesai and Arnab Goswami before going to bed. And one of the things I didn’t like about going to Chennai during the summer vacations was that all I could get to see would be some Tamil serials. Finally, I was a huge cricket fan. I didn’t miss a ball even if India was playing Kenya in some god-forsaken part of the world in a stadium with less people watching than the players on the field.
So when I contemplated living in Bangalore without access to a television, I thought it would be tough. The previous year, I had spent the final semester in Bangalore, also without a TV, but on that occasion I was putting up with friends. This time my only resources for entertainment would be books, radio and my desktop. But it didn’t turn out to be half as difficult as I had imagined. Having to travel to work by bus I generally started early from home to beat the morning rush. And having nothing much to do at home, I returned late, leaving just enough time to freshen up, have dinner and go to bed. Mom kept telling me to get a TV or at least a TV Tuner card for my system but I wasn’t interested. I was starting to enjoy the liberation from TV. I no longer had to worry about missing a good movie on HBO. I did not have to worry about coming home in time for a TV show. No longer did I spend time sitting in front of the TV and just flipping channels in the hope of catching something interesting. And if I wanted to see some movie, I could just rent or buy a DVD, instead of having to sit through 10 minute-long commercial breaks every 15 minutes. I believed that not having a television actually made my life better. And whatever little doubt I had was dispelled when I went home for Diwali.
I had heard of the huge success of Indian Idol and the numerous reality shows that had been launched as a result, but had never had the chance to watch any. When I finally did see one, I was glad that I had to wait so long. The singing and dancing were good but that was only one part of the package. What made the shows tick were the histrionics of the participants and more surprisingly, the judges. If one judge thought that a performance was excellent, you could be sure that the other would disagree. It wasn’t uncommon to see judges fighting over whose opinion was correct. And the less said about the participants the better. The stage was not the only place where they performed. Their performance began from the time they were in the audience, to going backstage before the performance, performing onstage, hearing the result from the judges and going back to the audience. Their emotions varied from disbelief to hope to ecstasy to helplessness to anger to frustration to worry to confusion to pure joy. And this was an infinite cycle from which they never seemed to emerge. All this seemed extremely silly to me and I found it hard to believe that in some parts of the country people held rallies to protest the voting out of the participant from their region. But the show that really irritated me was MTV Roadies. The participants of the singing and dancing shows, with all their fake emotions, seemed like angels when compared to the Roadies participants. I’ve seen 2 or 3 episodes and I fail to understand the point of the show, except that it promotes bitchiness, nastiness and backbiting. The hosts of the show, namely, Rannvijay, Nikhil Chinnapa and an absolute irritant called Raghu Ram, who is also the creator and producer of the show, seem to revel in the power they have to embarrass and humiliate the participants, not that the participants mind it one bit. It is surprising to see the limits people can go to ensure that they are not the ones voted out from the show. They scheme, they gossip, they lie, spread malicious rumours. Anything goes, as long as they get to be on the show. But these reality shows are only part of the reason why I didn’t get a TV.
No comments:
Post a Comment