When will this stop???

Which channels do you generally surf on Indian Television? If you ask this to a Kid, you will get answers like Pogo, Disney, etc. If you ask the same to a teenager or working bachelors, they would say ESPN, STAR ONE, etc. A housewife will answer Star, Sony, Zee or NDTV Imagine. Retired people prefer watching Astha. But if you ask the same question to a married corporate person, he would answer NDTV profit in the morning. Then the natural question follows. What about the evening? Even though most will not say this, but the actual answer is – ‘Arre bhai, biwi TV dekhne kahan deti hai? Jab dekho Tulsi ki kahani leke baith jati hai’.

This is the kahani of all most all families in our country. Saas bahu dramas which have been running since the last 8 years are no where near their closure. Can you imagine daily soap running for 8 years? That accounts to 1600+ episodes, at 200+ per year. 1600+ episodes, i.e. story of 800+ hours. A sane person can never imagine how a story can be told for so long. I think there must be 50 such saas bahu serials being telecasted on various channels. All these serials have almost the same story. Even if the background is different, ultimately they show the same things. E.g. serials like Dil mil gaye, Jersey No 10, etc which are based on Doctors and cricket players respectively have turned into dumb love and hate stories after few episodes.

But the problem with these serials is they are not story based. They are TRP based. Even though the serial makers have nothing new to show, they would add some ridiculous twist to the story (hero dying, heroine marrying somebody else, hero returns and badla) to drag it for few more months. These kinds of twists have been happening in all the serials. Still the stupid viewers in India never stop watching them. This increases the TRP and such sick serials go on forever. Somebody should show Ekta kapoor (the lady who changed the face of Indian television, from good to bad) the serials being made in the west (LOST, Smallville, Prison Break, 24, etc) to make her realize what TV serials are actually capable of and what she is delivering.

15 years back, we were making serials like Stone boy, Indradhanush, Malgudi Days, Mahabharat, Jungle Book, Neenv, Mitti ke rang. Just have a look at the serials running now – Babool ka angan chute naa, Betayaan apni yaan paraya dhan, etc etc (all CRAP)

The only show which is watchable on Indian TV is Roadies, but that too runs just for few months. Sometimes I feel I should lift my TV and go and break it on Ekta Kapoor’s head. And I am sure many will help me in doing that.

The Black Saturday

The Saturday started like any other day. I woke up at 9 AM. Nobody else was up yet. There was no live telecast on TV, nor were there any fav TV series (read Roadies….everything else is just bullshit, but more about that in future posts). Still it was an important day, I mean even Gabbar was querying about it the other day. It was Holiday, i.e. Holi Day. So I started waking the others up from their slumber. With some people this task is pretty easy. But with some other like Poo, P and M Jr, it is like getting Sachin Tendulkar out. Anyways after some hard work, put in by D and M Sr, all of them got up.

Then M Sr and D went to get the Rang. Requirement was very specific. No colour, only Gulal. We delivered as per the specification. But like every client, Poo changed the requirements at the last moment and raised a change request (she wanted some pichkari and balloons too). After much deliberation and brain storming, we decided against the change request and asked everybody to manage with the current config. So we played Holi with Gulal (later on Poo brought some colour too, which she had brought from Kolkata). Till this part of the day everything was going fine. We were enjoying the holi. Keeping with the tradition, we even went to a bakery and had samosa, cold drinks and desserts.

But once everybody washed the colour down the drain and were ready to enjoy the rest of the day, the god of bad luck decided he has no other work and will spend the rest of the day with us. We went to Runway 9 (for new comers in Hyderabad, this is the carting place). But by the time we reached there, it was already raining and the carting track got closed down for the day. Still we hoped may be the laser gun game will open up and hence to do some TP till then, we played snooker. But the rain didn’t stop and hence no laser game happened. We left the place with a heavy heart (as our evening plans were ruined) and went to Mocha.

Mocha as everybody knows is a great hangout place and we generally enjoy our time there. It has a closed roof and hence we were sure, nothing could have gone wrong there. But as they say, Murphy’s Law never disappoints you. Between our chitchats, M told me that he can smell something burning. I thought kisika dil jal raha hoga (remember dil jalta hai to jalne de). But just 2 mins later, a stampede started in the coffee shop. Apparently there was a short circuit and the safety equipments were already burning. So we had to leave Mocha without having anything. I was thankful to God that nothing disastrous happened. However after I saw people leaving in a hurry, I thought, oh shit, only if we could have had something and then this incident would have occurred, at least kuch to fayda hota (khane ka khana and no payment). You see the Monisha (Sarabhai fame) in all of us never dies.

After 2 utter failures, we were left with hungry stomachs and loads of time to kill. So the next target was barista crème. When we reached Barista, M in his car was just in front of my car. Just as M entered into Barista, the sky turned red, a dreadful lightening struck somewhere near and the power for the whole area went down. Although nothing else happened, but due to the power failure, poor souls in Barista had to manage without AC the whole time. By this time we were suspecting that all these can’t be coincidence and there is something wrong.

To verify this, we went to Ohris for mid night desserts. We enjoyed our time there and rejected our theory that there is anything wrong with our luck. However, Mr. Bad luck was sitting right next to us and laughing. While returning from Ohris, a portion of the hussain sagar (read the pothole on the street) got splashed onto 2 bikers by Poo (accidentally). Unfortunately, the riders were John Abraham and Uday chopra (Dhoom fame) in disguise. They chased Poo’s car till her place (in between they fell down after crashing on another pothole). Once they stopped Poo’s car, they started sharing their knowledge of Telugu very politely and created a scene. By the time we reached there in my car, the atmosphere was red hot. After half an hour of climax fighting, a settlement was reached and we all came back to M & P’s place. No one was ready to sleep yet. A long discussion about the incident, about Sriram (a character we met during the climax fighting, more about him later) and game of LIFE were waiting for us.

Killer - The Holi Assassin

Last 3 days have been so hectic that I had to take leave from office today to refresh my mind and prepare myself for the office tomorrow. NO, I haven’t been working day n night, which demands this break. I have been holidaying with friends. 3 full days of pure fun n masti for us and bad luck for some other people (details to follow later, for the time being just one small part of it).

There were 7 of us in Hyderabad for this Holi and we enjoyed our days outside, whereas night time was for board games, card games, dumb charade and killer. We all assembled at M n P’s place and the ground rule was that no one will sleep until all of us feel sleepy. I learnt about this killer game in the process. Believe it or not, I had never heard of this game before (even though it seems it’s a very famous game). And it turned out to be pretty interesting. First the rules for the new comers. Pretty simple, paper chits are made with 1 K (killer), 1 D (detective) and rest just NIKE tick marks. One who is the killer had to kill tick marked people by winking at them (without the detective knowing about it). When a tick marked person dies, he/she has to say ‘I am dead’. After 3 people die, the detective has to guess the killer’s identity.

This game was sandwiched between dumb charade and LIFE. We played it for some 45 minutes, as it was getting increasingly monotonous. People were getting bored, when M suggested some changes to the game and all 7 of us started devising new rules for the game. After 15 minutes of brain storming and vetoing various rules, we decided on one basic change. We added a new person into the game, called suicide bomber. He is an agent of the killer and has the license to kill one person before exploding himself. So his job description is to kill 1 person by winking at him and the say ‘I m dead’ himself. This made the game much more difficult for the detective and excitement level suddenly rose. We enjoyed an extra hour playing killer because of this rule. LIFE followed killer and god knows what after that. It has been very very hectic 3 days and nights for us and we always wished if only these holidays could go on forever.

Anyways, I have learnt a new game and our group has devised some new rules for it. May be one day we will patent this rule and make it as famous as football. May be one day this will be a part of the Olympics and I shall be officiating in the final. Ok, now I guess I am day dreaming. Its 1 PM in the afternoon and instead of working in the office, I am writing this blog. Jai VELLA baba ki jai.

Next post – The black Saturday.