My experiments with TV!

To be a Poonam Saxena…

It was a Sunday. Again. If I have to be a Poonam Saxena or a Shailaja Bajpai, the first thing I have to do is watch TV, I thought. Therefore I decided to spend the whole day watching TV! Armed with two bottles of water and some snacks, I positioned myself in front of the TV. Within 10 minutes I’d surfed the entire set of channels and had found nothing interesting. I wouldn’t give up. Not so early.

For the first time I realized that there were more than five full-time sports channels! Except that when I as watching three of them showed cricket. If you don’t like cricket….too bad…well, you could watch the music channels.
However, you need to like Indi-pop or the latest Bollywood music to watch them. The next ten minutes that I spent watching music channels, I found that only five to six songs were being repeated in all the channels. Thus, if you like any other form of music (jazz, classical, old songs) …again, bad luck, you should try out the ‘family’ channels.
They have only two options- either watch soap operas or reality shows. Since these get the highest TRPs, I thought, I should watch them for a while. Question: why are they called reality shows when, clearly, they are staged? I reminded myself to check the dictionary for ‘reality’. I was beginning to realize how difficult the job of the people who review television is.

Then, of course, my remote took me to ‘devotional’ channels. Everything, including the sets, looks the same. Saffron-clad men and women perched on a pedestal, some flowers around them and a few audiences from all ages (very important!). There is no point talking about what they said because I found it incomprehensible.
If religious and spiritual discourse is not your cup of tea…Hmm…try the news channels.

News channels. Now that sounds interesting, I thought. While surfing I lost count of how many there were. At first I wondered if all were owned by the same person or if it is the same channel with different anchors. Not only was the news item same but event the words used by the anchors were also similar (much like the newspapers that use agency copies).

After spending a few minutes expressing disgust over the anchors’ choice of clothes, I moved on. But where to? I’d pretty much exhausted all options on TV.

That Sunday morning I learnt one important lesson. The profile of an average urban TV viewer is of one who likes cricket (no matter how old the match is!), Himesh Reshamya, K-serials (as they are popularly called), staged reality shows and news channels with good looking anchors who have horrible dress sense.
If that is not what the average viewer is like than he’s forced to like it. There is no option.
One thing that was common to all the channels was advertisements. Millions of them.

In mere two hours, I’d come to the conclusion that TV viewing is a different ball game altogether. I would spend my Sundays as always: reading a book and lazing around.

Raksha Kumar.