||Bonding with so called 'Intellectuals' #CC 16 IO - Page 3

Strongly vocal in favor of women's role in and outside their homes, Purnendu Shekhar categorized TV as a modern shaping tool for the family. "To be in the TV industry, we have to understand our families, our own lives, and especially the women at our homes. If cinema is a predominantly male medium, it is the TV which represents the female", he said.

And the essence of TV is in the series. For most of the cases, television serials are known for the roles of the women characters in it.

It always begins with a concept - a plot grounded in family relationships. The script elaborates the plot visually, with event substantiation. "Whichever department you belong to", Purnendu Shekhar addressed the students, "Direction, Acting, Editing or Cinematography, everyone has to understand the script thoroughly, and analyze it.

"Only then it becomes possible for an artist to create an impact as conceived by the writer."

Asked how he gets ideas for a story, or script, he puts the credit to the observation and memory. It was his own childhood experiences that goaded him to write a script on child marriage. Thus came Balika Vadhu.

He said, he had written the story way back in 1992. While growing up in Rajasthan, he saw many girls getting married at a minor age. Once he saw a girl in Rajasthan who was feeding breast milk to her own child openly without covering up; she was a minor, and was so innocent that she did not even realize that she had to cover up. People passing by were smiling sarcastically. That experience left a strong inedible impression on his mind, which triggered his thoughts to pen down the story.

Child marriage was popular in the Indian subcontinent just half a century back. Even today it exists in many Asian countries. Purnendu Shekhar decided to wield his pen against this. The concept worked as it stimulated the public to reasoning, and paved way to a critical consensus to the social evil connected to the child marriage.

He sculpted his characters out of the average Indian family. These characters are not merely moving shadows on the screen. He gave them flesh and blood. As the audience could identify with them immediately, by the characters' connection to the real life in India, the series became a super hit.

When he joined the TV industry, it was dominated by highly dramatized melodrama series like Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki. He tried to cut out of that tradition by bringing realism, with Astitva - Ek Prem Kahani.

His other series, Saath Phere, is somewhere between these two approaches, which he based on a strategy. Balika Vadhu, on the contrary, did not use much strategy to attract audiences.It was more of realistic drama which was shown in its true essence so that people could relate.

Talking about cinema, Purnendu said, a filmmaker has the liberty to show what he has conceived in his mind, and what he has framed in his vision. But in case of television serials, there is always interference from the channel, or the producer's side. The writer of a television industry works under more pressure and has many levels of approval to cross.