Soap suds or duds?

TELLY VISION

With most of Indian television going the way it is, there's just one thing left for viewers to do: throw their hands up in the air and accept defeat. I'm talking about some Indian soaps that continue to shower garbage in the name of creativity.

Pakistani film director Meher Jabbar, in an interview published in this paper, lamented that even Pakistani dramas "" once considered superlative in her country's entertainment genre, and much better received than even films "" had hit their nadir thanks to the invasion of Ekta Kapoor serials there. Many of the Pakistani serials, I'm told, are now looking like poor clones of Indian family soaps.

Audiences in our neighbouring country, women especially, are sporting bindis on their foreheads (a huge rage since Kapoor's Kasauti Zindagi Kii was illegally aired in Pakistan). One even hears that women in Pakistan are rushing to their neighbourhood darzis begging them to copy designs worn by characters in these television soaps.

Even if it's easy to scoff at millions of people who get influenced to maniacal levels by these soap operas, researchers all over the world are baffled at the rate and the degree at which television is controlling the minds of millions.

In Alexandria, for instance, an organisation called Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation released its report which examined the inclusion of "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender themes and characters on TV".

It'll take several years before India's entertainment industry gets completely sensitised in this aspect, but this report found that 15 per cent of prime time programmes on television channel ABC contained either homosexual characters or discussions on homosexuality. Content wise, ABC was rated "good" in portraying homosexuals sensitively and in a positive light on their shows. Fox, on the other hand, ranked "poor" in the report.

While it's difficult to come to many conclusions about television's impact on the thinking of people, various polls in America have indicated that acceptance of homosexuality in America is at an all-time high. And incidentally, experts there are crediting TV for this change.

In India, Bobby Darling, one of the very few representatives of homosexuals in the Indian entertainment industry, has often been candid in her views on her community's portrayal on television and in films.

I'd interviewed her when she suffered a quick exit from Sony's reality show, Bigg Boss, and she admitted that she was mad to announce to the audiences her desire of needing the prize money for a sex-change operation.

"I went out of the show because the audiences couldn't tolerate listening to my bold statements," she had said. Film directors too, she said, invariably gave her roles where homosexuality was a joke, and homosexuals a non-entity.

Why just homosexuals, when was the last time you saw a physically or a mentally challenged character getting any sober space on any of the TV sitcoms? Kyunki..., I'm told, had a mentally challenged character who ended up molesting a girl in the serial, while Joydeep, another "adult with a kid's mind", got married much to the distress of his onscreen wife, Bhoomi. Last heard, he's getting a makeover and has already begun back-answering his wife.

Where's the real picture?

(abhilashaojha@gmail.com)