For all the controversy surrounding the 19th Commonwealth Games (CWG), the opening ceremony went off without a glitch. The games have got off to a good start. Hopefully the rest of the Games will also be conducted with equal efficiency. While the opening ceremony had lots of colour, lots of sound and some good music too, and while there were some innovative ideas, like the display of yoga and the electronic man, the real clincher for the evening was the Rs 40 crore helium aerostat that added some visual excitement. It was the only innovation in a programme that stuck to a tried and tested government of India formula for official entertainment. The Games opening was a mix of a Republic Day parade, with its government-organised floats and school children acts, and a Festival of India routine of Indian classical and folk dance and music. The biggest surprise of the evening was that everything went according to plan. The biggest disappointment of the evening was A R Rahman’s theme song for the CWG. Despite his best effort to improve upon the original score that was widely criticised, Mr Rahman did not click. It appeared as if he was acutely conscious of this fact given that he chose to end the evening with his tried and tested Oscar winning song, Jai Ho from Slumdog Millionaire.
While a good 50,000 people watched the show in New Delhi, millions of Indians and other citizens of the Commonwealth countries would have been disappointed by Doordarshan’s shoddy and greedy telecast of the event. A two-and-a-half-hour live show was stretched to nearly four hours on television thanks to intermittent insertion of tediously long number of advertisements. Surely, a major international event like this could have been telecast live without interruption. Even if Doordarshan wanted to make some money, having spent so lavishly on equipment and logistics, it could have inserted the advertisements on a strip below the visual instead of interrupting the telecast and robbing the viewer of the real excitement of watching a live show. Worse, the camerawork was shoddy and so was the sound. All in all, the TV viewing of the event left much to be desired. On occasions like this, Doordarshan must remember that it is after all a public service broadcaster, and should find better ways of satisfying its greed for money.
Events like these normally have two purposes. First, to entertain, not just the immediate audience physically present at the event but the virtual audience worldwide watching it on television; second, to awe and inspire the audience who would, in turn, speak about it to all those who may have missed it. The ripple effects of such events build a nation’s brand. The CWG opening ceremony would not normally have had such a positive externality for India, save for the fact that the event was preceded by weeks of bad news. Given all the predictions of doom and declarations of despair, the very fact that everything went off well would itself be seen as a great achievement.
