Kyonki Ma bhi kabhi Behan thi ?

As I was walking back home from office I saw a huge bill board with the line, “ Kya bahu bhi kabhi beti ban sakti hai?” “9090 par SMS karen”. For a moment I thought, at the end of what I would categorise, a hard day at work, I was seeing things. But as I got near the billboard, I realised, that my eyes in spite of all its problems were still seeing the right thing. The question reminded me of the social dramas that Mumbai cinema used to churn out in the

Some entertainment in my mother tongue of hindi is what I look forward to at the end of a hard day. And so I made the mistake of switching on the television ( having bought a new tata sky DTH connection). The first serial I came across was “ Ghar ki laxmi - Betiyaan” ( or was it Betiayaan - apna ya paraya dhan?) which my mother tells me is the biggest thing to happen on Indian tv after Kyonki Ma bhi kabhi Behan thi (oops you all know what I mean).

Some channel surfing told me that at the same time one could also watch “ Kittu Sab Jaanti hai”, “ thodi si zameen thoda sa aasman” ( which has Smriti Irani trying to encash some popularity she has gained as Tulsi) and “Desh main nikla hoga chaand”. If you have the patience to sit through all of these you can then catch “ Kahani Ghar Ghar ki” and “Kya hoga Nimmo Ka” also. Now don’t ask me which channel plays what.

If you still haven’t realised, one thing common to all these serials is the fact that the main character in all these serials is a woman. A woman who has been taking all the crap her family and other women have been dishing out all these years. Men in these serials are just props in the background. If you take them out, it wouldn’t really make a difference. So one field were women clearly dominate is television serials, they are of the women, made largely by one wo-man ( Ekta Kapoor) and on the face of it, for the women.

Does that mean men really do not form a part of the target audience? Are television channels ignoring what remains the major part of the population? A very difficult question to answer. I really do not have any research to answer the above question, but there is some very interesting anecdotal evidence.

My father is a big soap opera watcher. In fact he was the one in the family who started the trend, by watching“ Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki” regularly, a few years back. And since then my mother tells me she has been hooked on to the soap bandwagon. Though my logic for this is different: When your husband controls the remote, you better watch, what he is watching. And there is no point in watching and not enjoying what you are watching.

My father’s logic for watching these serials is that they potray the right values (though that remains debatable, as they say, one man‘s martyr is another man‘s terrorist). Ma watches it obviously because Dad does. And of course, when other women discuss there favourite characters when they meet, she wouldn’t want to feel left out. More than that what both of them don’t tell, is that they relate to the drudgery of the characters at some level. And then like most of us do, indulge in self pity.

Being a journalist I take the liberty to generalise ( that’s another advantage of being a journalist, you have two examples and you have a trend story ready) and come to the conclusion, that men watch soap operas as much as women do and that’s why television channels have them all over the place. That’s how any free market operates, we get what the large majority wants, which necessarily may not be good all the time (oops here I had just one example, but as you would appreciate if there can be trend with two examples, there can surely be a trend with one as well. After all the difference between two and one, is just one).

Now that brings me back to the original problem. How do I entertain myself? Guess the only way out is to start watching these serials. With the slow pace at which they proceed, hope to get involved with the daily lives of the characters. And then hope, it makes a difference to my life, when the next 20 year leap on Kyonki Ma Bhi Kabhi Behan Thi, happens. It’s always comfortable to be with the herd.

Back to Kashmir

“ You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again” wrote travel writer Bill Bryson, in his book, The Lost Continent, Travels in Small Town America. The final part of this line looped in my mind as Go Air flight G8/807, landed in my hometown of Srinagar. I was coming home again, back to this city of my summer holidays, after 209 months.

What made me come back to Kashmir, during the peak winter season, was my boyhood dream of seeing a snowfall. Till I turned twelve, we visited Kashmir every year for one month during the summer holidays. And it did not snow in summers. In 1989 terrorism struck and it wasn’t considered safe to visit the valley anymore. Since then the perception has stayed.

As soon as I got out from the flight I was hit by a gust of cold and clean air. This is something that one does not experience in the midst of concrete that one chooses to live in. From the airport as I headed towards the hill station of Gulmarg, I realised that this was not the Srinagar I grew up in. This city like other major cities across India is in the middle of a real estate boom, with construction happening everywhere. The roads which once looked familiar wore an unfamiliar look. As we passed through the area where my grandparents used to live, I could not for all my trying locate the lane where our house used to be. The house had been long burnt down and from all the new houses that had sprung up in the locality, I wondered which one of these houses had been built on the top of ours. Had things changed beyond recognition or had I stayed away for too long?

I had been warned of the army and para military forces carrying out search operations every few kilometers. But nothing like that happened. Yes, one could see an occasional soldier standing on the street with a gun in his hand, but the bunkers constructed to fight terrorism seemed to have been largely done away with. The valley it seems is willing to give peace a chance.

After about two hours we drove into a totally white Gulmarg, covered under snow. There was just snow, snow and more snow. The greenery that this place is famous for during summers had totally gone missing except for the leaves of pine trees which could still be seen. The sunsets and the sunrises set the sky ablaze and made the snow shine. It was like seeing a post card in real life. And if we all were allowed to take just one holiday in our lives, this is the place we should be going to.

On the second day of my stay at Gulmarg, I took a Gondola (cable car) to Kongdoor. And there at 10,050 feet above the sea level I saw my first snowfall. It lasted for all of ten minutes. Shahjahan got it just right, a few millenia back when he said said, “Agar firdous bar rui-e-zameen ast, Hamin ast-o-hamin ast-o-hamin ast!" ( if there is paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here) or should I say what Paullo Coellho said in the Alchemist, “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it”.