Promoting anti-TV

TELLY VISION

Having visited a friend recently in Jaipur, I was appalled to see how addicted her three-year-old had become to television.

The toddler's typical day started around 8 am when he would begin to bawl and rush to pick up the TV remote to watch Cartoon Network. He would have crawled into the screen if he had his way and food was fed to the kid while he gawped at the cartoon characters.

"Eat," his mother would implore, and the tiny tot would chomp for brief seconds, after which another tiny bite would fill his mouth and his mother would command him once again to chew his food.

I rarely saw the television set switched off in their house. And though the constant sound of the television gave even me a headache after a point, my friend, her husband and her baby were obviously addicted to it.

What should my friend do? How should she tackle television addiction at her home? She admits she can't stop her child, because her husband too is hooked to TV.

Maybe what she and thousands like her need is the assistance of White Dot, an organisation started in 1996 against television. It started as a newsletter prompting British citizens to turn off their televisions.

While everyone initially mocked at the idea, today the organisation is successfully publishing journals and books, besides hosting campaigns against television.

The organisation held a TV-turnoff week in Britain in April 2006 complete with volunteers in different parts of London urging people to join in "Zocalos-inspired living" (Zocalo is Mexican for town square).

White Dot ran events to bring people out of their homes to interact without thinking too much about what they were missing on TV. The promoters claim that nearly 5 million homes responded and 25,000 schools participated in the event this year.

Interestingly, in a book called The Plug-in Drug, in 1977, Marie Winn, a journalist and TV critic, mentioned ways to go anti-TV. The idea was taken up later by a non-profit group called TV Turnoff Project and caught on with the Society for Ecology and Culture in Bhutan and Ladakh and by White Dot in Britain.

I'm eagerly waiting for the day when India will host its very own anti-TV campaign, go on a week-long anti-TV fast, say no to Ekta Kapoor serials, ban useless serials like Kasam Se and Dulhan, and bring down TRPs to dangerously low levels.

Of course, the catch is that an anti-TV fast would also mean doing away with some of the genuinely interesting programmes and documentaries. But that doesn't bother anti-TV promoters: for them, a ban is a ban.

There are anti-TV cartoons, poems opposing the telly and even organisations similar to White Dot that are strongly opposing the complete takeover of television in our lives. Turnoffyourtv.com, for instance, regularly publishes anti-TV cartoons and even sells interesting merchandise (caps, tee-shirts, mugs, stickers and buttons), all promoting anti-TV campaigns.

I know what I'll gift my friend next. A mug that screams "Kill your television" and an anti-TV guide called Get a Life by White Dot. Maybe that'll help. Or maybe she'll continue to watch TV while sipping coffee from the same mug and ordering her glaze-eyed child to eat.