Articles/ Updates/ Positive Comments - Page 410

Originally posted by: lovelyprincesst

wow... great news... but u sure abt it.....if its true m happy for kirti 😊

i think arijit is better then rahul

dont know but rahul saxena is my all time favourite

Originally posted by: aries_sakshi

the scenario here is very bad... the worst affected area is sarojini nagar market (SN Market).. ppl r not able to comeout frm those terrible scene... still rescue operationis underway... more than 55 have died n many r hospitalised.. tomm market will b closed.

ya was going through news papers, really sad

thanks diksha for the news, I m really happy for all the contestants

Originally posted by: lovelyprincesst

Dosti ki tadap ko dikhaya nahi jata,
Dil me lagi aag ko bhujaya nahi jata,
kitni bhi duri ho dosti mein,
Aap jaise dosto ko bhulaya nahi jata...

very well said.. thanks...😊

Originally posted by: lovelyprincesst

y it always happen that i m talking to ma self 😭 😭

hey buddy.. don't worry.. we all read ur comments when we login on IF.

Originally posted by: chinkybasu

Shanker Mahadevan has taken Kirti to South Africa for a concert....wow! No wonder his name is not in the list of people going back to Gurukul.

Btw, Rahul Saxena vs Arijit Singh....who do u think is better?????

thanks chinky for sharing this info... shankar said he will b making an album with rex n mona... wht happen..

i like Rahul saxena.. i heard his song.. teri bheegi bheeigi which II contsnt sang in their introductory album ...

rahul is my fav than arijit.

Srinagar smiles at last




If there is anything more tedious and boring than singing competitions in TV, I have yet to hear of them. And the most long-drawn and tedious of them all has been Sony's Fame Gurukul.



Even more time consuming than the singing was the contrived suspense at every turn, with judges who looked more wise than they were, taking all the time in the world to reduce mostly mediocre singer to tears while the cameras focussed on their anxious faces, nail bitting and even more anxious teachers and mammas as they squirmed in the audience.



When we reached the climax at last, and lost count of how many episodes the climax itself took, Mandira Bedi, who had been displaying only noodle straps or shoulder less blouses so far, decided to add to the masala by first, showing her not-too-interesting midriff throughout the proceedings, and then prolonging the suspense as long as she wished by taking her time over every syllable and every false promise of revealing the results, so that we could not avoid gazing at her belly, which seemed to attract the camerapersons than the contestants who, after all, had only their anxious faces to show.



There had to be something redeeming somewhere in this long yawn, and there was. A hitherto unknown young man from Srinagar, who at least had a different quirky hair style, and oodles of confidence made it to the last three and eventually emerged as winner together with a typical Bengali girl who did more nakhra than singing.



And Srinagar, reeling from earthquakes, assassinations and political intrigues certainly rose to the occasion. Not only did two little boys run away from their village to make it to Qazi Tauqueer's home in Srinagar to join in the celebrations and taste the sweets being generously handed around, but we also saw Qazi's mother, who had braved it to the contest, smiling unbelievably over her progeney's success. Srinagar now had an all India celebrity.



However, talking of tediousness, whenever, a show is announced to be a comedy, we immediately become suspicious. Genuinely funny shows need neither advance warnings, nor do they need that terrible mistimed and monotonous canned laughter which go with them. The Great Indian Comedy show with Shekher Suman is not only becoming monotonous and predictable, what also goes side by side is worse.



This is the much hyped competition of funny men (women seem to be at discount) which is judged by funny man Cricket star cum MP Navjot Singh Sidhu and of course, Shekher Suman. Now judges, we were led to believe, should keep straight and severe, non committal faces when judging even funny shows.



But Navjot Singh Sidhu is so carried away by the comics, who seldom rise above the level of schoolboys jokes and puja pandal humour that he starts laughing even before they have started their comic turn, since he laughs prematurely and consistently for every contestant and seems to divide his laughter without ever taking sides.



One wonders on what basis he does his judging. Shekhar Suman goes one better. He quite often caps a contestant' comic turn with one of his own. Not to join the contest, mercifully, but in the spirit of "anything you can do, I can do better" Since most of his own shows are derived from well-known foreign ones, one would have thought he had nothing to prove.



What I would list among the wasteful trivia of TV took place last week. Karva Chauth, which for middle class housewives is becoming a sort of poor woman's Page 3, occupied the screens of most channels for over two days. It seems that karva chauth is no longer a private, personal annual prayer for one's husband, but something to show and talk about on TV, including the new fashions in mehndi, which now extends right up to the shoulders in fancy patterns, and showing off one's saris and make upto the TV cameras. Lucky the husbands survive this onslaught.



As for the astrologer who forecast his exact time of death and conned at least three channels into waiting anxiously for his much hyped demise, serve the channels right that he finally announced that his time had not yet come . But not before leaving the channels red in the face, but reminding viewers how frequently they are taken for a ride.

As for the Govinda fiasco, in spite of irritating publicity reminders on my mobile, it left me cold. Reviving something after 15 years is bad, but all those views from viewers reminded us that some people will say and do anything to see their names on TV. And that such profuse opinions are always under suspicion of being rigged.

The first byte

Niret and Nikhil Alva, creators of Indian Idol and Fame Gurukul, arrived on the reality TV platform way before Abhijit Sawant and Qazi Touqeer made it a household favourite, says Sourish Bhattacharyya

Javed Akhtar used to wonder whether Kashmir had really been mainstreamed into India as we would like to believe. After over four months as Fame Gurukul judge, the poet is no longer wracked by self-doubt. There's no way Qazi Touqeer would've walked away with the top honour and millions of best wishes had only the Valley voted for him.

His victory, Akhtar told the show's creator, Niret Alva, was small-town India's way of telling the world that though it couldn't make a real difference to the Valley's political situation, it could at least vote for Qazi and make Kashmir bond with India.

Voiceless Indians like the 36-year-old Jabalpur housewife and mother of two who has run up a cellphone bill of a lakh in a month and a half because she kept SMSing from five in the morning to bail out Qazi, may have achieved what the country's leadership hasn't. They may have ended the Valley's deep-rooted sense of alienation, which Niret was reporting as a television journalist working for the news video magazine,

Eyewitness, 15 years ago. In just one Fame Gurukul episode, Qazi got 48 lakh SMSs in his support.

"Now, we're looking at the fallout of the Qazi phenomenon," says Niret, who's jet-hopping across the country for the early rounds of Indian Idol II, which goes on air on November 21. "This year, we have been swamped with entries from towns in Kashmir I had never heard of." Coming from Niret, it means a lot.

He, after all, had interviewed Kashmiri militants in their hideouts when the Valley was on fire and nearly gave the late Gen. Krishnaswamy Sundarji an apoplectic fit by telling him at a media briefing that the Army had killed more people at peace-time than in the wars it has fought. Today, he has colonels and DIGs pulling rank on him in their eagerness to see their wards become the next Abhijit Sawant or Ruprekha Banerjee.

"When we first went to channels with the idea of doing reality shows," recalls Nikhil, his younger brother and CEO, "no one gave us much of a chance. Indians don't want more reality, they have too much of it already in their lives, we were told." Initially, even the brothers weren't very sure when the BBC pushed them to produce the reality TV series, Hospital in 2001, which won many awards for its fly-on-the-wall view of the country's leading government hospital, All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

"If you can shoot wildlife, you can also make a reality TV show," said the BBC executive whom the brothers had approached with a blueprint for a series on environmental issues. They had, after all, produced the country's first television show, Living on the Edge in 1994, which ran for 200 episodes, first on Doordarshan and then on Star - devoted to green issues without sounding like a couple of bleeding hearts. They'd managed even to rile the Atomic Energy Commission with their story on how our nuclear plants pollute water sources.

The tide has turned. Channel executives are scouring every trade show in the business for show formats they can sell to an audience that appears to have got addicted to reality. "In the past few years, the channels have been so Ektaa-heavy that there was no differentiator left," says Nikhil. "People were hungry for a different genre of programming."

The Alva brothers are preparing to give the country lots of it in the coming months. Even as they get Indian Idol II on the road, they are shooting real-life stories for Deal Ya No Deal, the game show that will be anchored by actor Madhavan. The idea is to zero in on 28 men and women with the most gripping stories to back their quest for the Rs 1 crore at stake.

Also in the pipeline is Extreme Makeover (Zee), which, unlike the American TV original, will have people with physical disabilities literally getting a second life on television. But Nikhil is "most excited and bullish about the pre-school space," which the Alva brothers are targeting with MAD (Pogo), now rated as the top-most children's programme across channels, and Sesame Street, the ground-breaking American show for pre-schoolers that is being completely localised by researchers and writers working overtime at Miditech's Delhi office, occasionally taking breaks on the strategically placed bean bags.

It has been a long journey for the Alva brothers, the badshahs of reality television, since September 5, 1992, when Doordarshan aired their first documentary on Teacher's Day. Nikhil, the younger of the two brothers, was the one to take the entrepreneurial plunge immediately after he'd graduated from St Stephen's with an honours degree in Maths. With an unemployed graduate loan, he launched Miditech (Music Instrumentation for Digital Interface of Technology is the full form of the acronym) with Julius Packiam (who's better-known now for his association with the Indipop group Joshilay).

Niret, also a Stephanian who read History before going to the Indian Institute of Mass Communications, was a full-time TV journalist, one of the earliest members of the tribe to be groomed by PTI TV's Sashi Kumar, who subsequently launched the Malayalam channel, Asianet.

That makes him the third-generation journalist in his family - Joachim and Violet Alva, his grandparents, had campaigned against the establishment, both before and after India became independent, through their influential magazine, Forum. Chittaranjan Alva, his uncle, was a well-regarded newsman and is now an important trade union leader, whom Niret still regards as a "huge influence" on him. Interestingly, his parents, Margaret and Niranjan Alva, were iffy about his career choice - being in politics (she's now the AICC General Secretary responsible for Maharashtra), Margaret Alva has mixed feelings about journalists.

"Blame my parents if you find Air-India and Indian Airlines air-hostesses dowdy," Niret says with a wicked smile. His parents fought the landmark case that protected the right of air-hostesses to get maternity leave and to keep flying after they turned 35.

It was only in 1993 that Niret and Nikhil teamed up to produce a documentary on the girl child in Rajasthan. It was a humbling experience for the brothers (Nivedith, the youngest of the Alva brothers, has joined them, and Priya, Nikhil's wife and school sweetheart, has been part of the team from the beginning). "We journalists have an exaggerated sense of self-importance," Niret says. "It is only when you get out of Delhi that you realise there are so many universes co-existing in this country without coming in contact with each other." Reality television is bringing these disparate worlds closer.

Har Ghadi Badal Raha Hai Roop Zindagi
Chaav Hai Kahhi Hai Dhoop Zidnagi
Har Pal Yahan
Jee Bhar Jiyo Jo Hai Sama
Kal Ho Na Ho

for u lovelyprincesst... !