Originally posted by: SiriuslySujal
@Bold: So, so true.
I've watched Balika Vadhu from the fairly early days (I was away at uni and came home for the holidays to find my parents obsessed with it, and they were like, "These kids are married and those young-looking people are the girl's saas sasur!" and I was like, "WHATTT. That's just mental. I ain't watchin' that
". But then they were talking so highly of it and said they cried during the Pratap death track, and I was like, "Well, all right...", and then of course I started to love it. And there was a time when I got really really really fed up of watching the stupid Kekta soaps and was watching no Indian serials except for BV... and I stopped watching even that for a bit (GASP
) when that whole Mumbai kidnapping of kid Jagya thing happened... I just thought it was getting a bit stupid and OTT, and decided to back out until the next good track came along. My mum was still watching, though, so I got to know about the bullet to head moment and Anandi's memory loss issue... and then I think I started watching again shortly after that. But anyway, around that time, I got majorly into Pakistani serials, which sound a little like the old Indian ones on DD etc that people here are reminiscing about (none of which I watched except Thoda Hai Thode Ki Zaroorat Hai... which kind of drove me nuts 'cause I remember the main characters would just not stop being sad ever 😕 Though maybe I'd appreciate it more now... I think I was about 6 at that time!).
A lot of Pakistani serials are really cool for several reasons. Save for a few long-running ones, most of them are very short... like weeklies which run for 20 or so episodes. There is a set story, that story runs, and the serial ends. This allows the makers to do justice to a story, take more care over each individual episode, and even use foreign locations for the entire story because they don't have to stay there to shoot for too long. Good actors are repeated from serial to serial rather than a new face being cast every serial regardless of acting talent or lack thereof... so they have a relatively small pool of hugely versatile actors playing a wide range of characters over the course of their careers. The stories portrayed are often different and unique, and while Pakistan as a nation is conservative enough that they don't push the envelope too much, modernity is never portrayed as a bad thing, there are rarely if ever any vamps (the negative characters are more like... possessive mothers or the like... in fact, the negative characters are often shown to be the ones whose thinking is so steeped in tradition that they lose some of their humanity in the bid to maintain old-school thinking in everyone around them... rather like DS in BV back when she was negative). I've seen them cover a range of issues, from mothers whose children abandon them in old age to how adopted children are viewed by society to how arranged marriages can go wrong due to incompatibility to love stories between younger guys and older women... Their portrayal is realistic, and the acting and treatment is such that there is no need for excessive makeup or pretty clothes for them to have an impact.
My point is... I'm not saying Indian serials should suddenly become way shorter or anything. But the makers should keep quality in mind and not keep a soap running when they've long run out of ideas for how to continue it just because they are getting decent TRPs. Good, talented actors should be recast more often (e.g. if BV ends and I don't see Shashank Vyas on screen ever again, I will be EXTREMELY SAD ). Concepts with reasonably long-term potential should be chosen (again, BV is a good example, because they have been able to extend it for ages touching on various different social issues). Characterisation should be clear and distinct... enough run-of-the-mill self-sacrificial heroines. It's scary how much influence Kekta soaps can have on people... I myself went through a phase from age 18 to about 21 (am almost 23 now) where I genuinely believed that I wasn't good enough unless I was perfect and self-sacrificial, like, say, Parvati or something. I KNEW LOGICALLY that these soaps were ridiculous. But watching them was enough to push that mentality into my head.
One thing that Indian soaps need to address (which Pakistani soaps are even worse at because of being more conservative a lot of the time) is SEXUALITY. Seriously, that's another thing soaps seriously messed me up for. I'm still having a hard time being OK with the idea of being proactive or forward if I'm interested in a guy. There's like a huge dichotomy between what I logically feel I can do (make a move to ask a guy out or say I want to do stuff with him) and what I emotionally feel I can do based on all the TV I've watched (not appear too forward, and let the guy make all the major moves so that he doesn't think less of me). I bet thousands of other soap-watching girls face similar internal dilemmas. They don't need to show raunch on-screen for that to happen or make themselves 'edgy' (like Bollywood films are trying to do these days). They just need to start showing girls being proactive in this area and slowly make that acceptable and OK to Indian audiences. At the moment the only on-screen discussion of sex I've seen in a TV programme has been in Gumraah, and that doesn't help because it shows stuff like MMS scandals and girls meeting shady older guys online, which just makes the issue seem even MORE stressful to anyone who needs to be put at ease about it. Manasi Parekh wrote an excellent blog entry on her IF blog about this issue and about the lack of original stories in Indian TV these days, and about how she is committed to doing good work and will not accept just any run-of-the-mill serial. It's an admirable attitude, but it won't change things because the telly industry doesn't value good actors in its constant search for new faces (as I mentioned above).
And then of course there is the strong need to show more positive women in professional roles which others have touched on in previous posts in this thread. Enough with the kitchen politics already. We want REAL women characters with substance, working in a range of interesting professions... not just doctors, but engineers and architects and entrepreneurs and the like. Working women who aren't afraid to stand up for what's right. We need self-sacrifice to be shown as something unique that few people do, not something that should be expected of any girl... to sacrifice for her family. I literally still have trouble getting that viewpoint out of my head from all my years of watching Kekta 🤢
Can't resist giving my views on some of the serials past and present which I've watched over the years:
1. Miley Jab Hum Tum - started off great, and had awesome potential, but then ended up treading the same old love tracks... then Nupur "died" and came back, and in the interim we got a love track between Samrat and Gunjan with amazing potential... but again the CVs didn't want to do anything too different. Overall, I was disappointed by it despite my love for the four leads.
2. Dill Mill Gaye - Where they could have shown a girl moving on with a new guy, they went back to the "first love never dies" formula and made her reunite with Mr. Tattoos & Muscles. LAME AND REGRESSIVE.
3. Jyoti - As Anj said, there was absolutely no need to destroy poor Pankaj's character and ruin the serial with the introduction of Kabir and his crazy political family! Caused me a load of BV-related grief worrying that Shiv would have a similarly insane family! Thankfully the Shekhars are insane in a good way xD
4. Sasural Simar Ka - Ermmm... what happened to the whole dancing thing? Why does nobody have career aspirations, including Roli, who's educated and quite young? Why is a 15-year-old actress allowed to play a married woman, and now a potential SURROGATE MOTHER, for goodness' sake!?
5. Ek Hazaron Me Meri Behna Hai - One of the better serials for acting and characterisation. Has the potential to be progressive when they stop overdramatising the cancer track so much (watched it the other day and Jeevika wanted to donate bone marrow to save her sister, and the doctor was like, "You're her blood relative!? You have the same blood group!? Sister, take her samples right away!!!", and then she tells him, "But I'm pregnant - can I still donate?", and he was like, "Pregnant!? What!? If you're pregnant, forget bone marrow, you can't even donate BLOOD!!!!". I was like... "Jeez, I thought doctors were meant to be calm..." xD)
5. Diya Aur Baati Hum - WHERE IS THE TRACK ADVERTISED WHEN THIS SERIAL WAS FIRST INTRODUCED!? When is Suraj going to get an education? When is he going to support Sandhya in HER desires instead of the other way around? HOW does this run-of-the-mill illogicalness garner such high TRPs?
6. Uttaran - When will the heroine and her mother learn to stand up for themselves and stop thinking of themselves as somehow worth less than their idiotic ex-bosses!?!? Why could two sisters never have a realistic bond? Why were Tapasya's feelings towards Icchha purely hatred and resentment? Why wasn't there more grey in there after all the years they'd spent together? Why was Icchha always so nice to her despite being treated like crap? Why wasn't there more realism? Actually, the points about lack of greyness and realism and the over-the-top need to HAMMER THE POINT INTO THE AUDIENCE THROUGH EXAGGERATION BECAUSE WE ARE TOO DUMB TO UNDERSTAND OTHERWISE go for most serials out there... and this is why I watch BV!!!! 'Cause it's above such nonsense... to some degree, at least. At least it assumes the viewers have a brain.
7. Saath Nibhana Saathiya - Utterly unrealistic characters. Kokila should be hospitalised for her severe control freakishness (the slightest bit of dirt or something being out of place seems to set her off... that can't be healthy!). Gopi just serves green tea and looks bashfully at Ahem Ji and seems to have no depth or dreams or aspirations... really, really, really regressive television. I used to watch it for a laugh, but I bet there are people out there who took and take it seriously...
8. Dhoondh Legi Manzil Humein - Nice concept let down by poor acting and poor treatment. And of course a bharatiya naari can't possibly marry a non-bharatiya guy. She has to fall for the nice bharatiya guy who's lattoo over her. Again, a show that could have shown something different had it taken the road less travelled... disappointing
9. Rang Badalti Odhni - A decent show with good acting... let down by somewhat boring plot twists that made me leave it (e.g. the lead couple having to pretend to not be married because of a crazy landlady who didn't want married couples under her roof). But overall pretty decent... and the makers quit while they were ahead, which was GOOD!
And, for the grand finale...
10. All Those Kekta Shows - OTT and unrealistic. The girl is what's known as a Mary-Sue in Harry Potter fanfiction... too good, talented at everything, beautiful, unrealistically self-sacrificing, and almost never moves on with another, better man unless the TRPs demand she does... and even then Prerna went back to Anurag and her black outfit with lal dupatta in the end despite all the years she'd spent with Mr. Bajaj... what was that all about!?!? What annoys me most about these shows is that they never show real, tender moments between characters (this is what I love about BV, and I swear it's the only show that does this). I can't feel for any of the Kekta characters any more, because they are all way too two-dimensional. That used to be masked in her earlier soaps because of the amazing actors she roped in (Smriti, Sakshi, Shweta Tiwari etc), but was painfully evident in the later ones like Bandini and now Parichay. Also, she just refuses to let go of the self-sacrifice plotlines... Siddhi of Parichay pretended to be evil and went to jail herself in order to save her husband from jail because some vamp who had the hots for her hubby told her to... stupid stupid stupid. 🤢 That's another show that has NOT done what it said on the tin... portray a complex man with a lack of conventional direction or goals whose family are frustrated with and don't understand him. Nope... that would be too different, wouldn't it? And different never gets TRPs... or so they think.
Anyway, that's more than enough of me ranting my views about Indian TV! If anyone actually reads all this, they get a virtual cookie xDDD 😃
Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2
