Of Old Dons and New Dhooms

This one’s for the desis among us that crave the saas-bahu soaps and grumble about not having a dish connection – despair not. Help is well on its way, and it doesn’t even entail as much hard work as picking up and dropping off DVDs in neat little Net Flix packages. Nor does it require you to make a trip to your local India video rental shack. You can now watch select Star World programs right in the heated comfort of your own home --- a click on the mouse button is all it takes. Star World is offering a select set of programs for online viewing at a measly sum.

With the upsurge of piracy, the industry has been going haywire, trying to restore a balance of sorts between money spent and ROIs. One sees veteran bigwigs right from Shah Rukh Khan, down to edgy newcomers like Abhay Deol, urging the random public to refrain from buying pirated copies of their movies. But little do they know that the random public, so to speak, would rather not spend at all, and watch movies on shady, free-for-all websites.

For someone who was surprised at a serialized collection of Ramanand Sagar’s “Ramayan” alongside Ekta Kapoor’s “Kyon Ki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi,” at the local video store, the concept of “buying” an episode of Karan Johar’s “Koffee with Karan,” at the price of a gallon of milk online was rather astounding. But when I heard about the possibility of catching sneak peeks of the show, as many others, on You Tube at no cost, I was further astonished. Whether you want to watch Shah Rukh mesmerize his contestants on KBC with his evergreen charm, or catch up on a 15-second post-engagement video of Abhishek Bachhan and Aishwarya Rai, it’s all up there for free.

In the wake of all this, DVD rates have been slashed, and video rentals are now dishing out movies under special rent-to-own schemes. Gone are the days when one had to make do with the rare Filmfare magazine on the stands at a Patel’s store to catch up on filmi gupshup. As are the times when one had to queue up at the local Indian restaurant to watch a game of World Cup cricket alongside hordes of fellow desi cricket fanatics, on big screen television. With the internet and other technological advancements today, it is possible to get real time podcasts of events that pique our silver screen and general desi curiosities. Yet, it leaves one with a wistfulness, a longing for the golden times of yore. The tele-serials and movies that didn’t require heroines to parade in near-nothings in the frozen expanses of Antarctica; the villains (male) to sprout a jagged vein on their shiny foreheads each time they caught sight of heroes and heroines cuddling in evergreen New York parks; and if they’re female, to sport snaky ‘bindis’ slithering between stenciled black curves for eyebrows, to denote their contempt; mothers to conspire against their own children, or vice versa; and where simplicity was just the order of the day. DD was the prime television channel, and fillers like “Sooraj ek, chanda ek, taare anek,” produced by the Films Division of India, actually promoted a feeling of oneness that stretched beyond huddling up in front of a Dyanora television set in the community and cheering Gavaskar and his mates on as they wrung the life out of their opponents. Advertisements never came in the way of a “Hum Log” or a “Nukkad” run, and when they did, people really didn’t have too many choices --- Nirma was always up against Surf (sans Excel or Power); Hamam, against Lifebuoy; and Colgate, against Binaca.

With the number of media conduits today, advertising possibilities that seem larger than life, brands wars, a crazy bunch of desi paparazzi that won’t rest till they get an actress or actor to wash their dirty linen in public (or make it seem so), and alleged underworld connections to the big bad industry that brings to our eyes the glamour and glitz of the Manish Malhotras and Tarun Tahilianis, and to our ears, the reverberating rhythm of the Rahmans and Shankar-Ehsan-Loys, it shouldn’t be surprising if the “Abhiwarya” wedding gets reduced to a complimentary mpeg file. Of course, Shilpa Shetty has stolen their thunder for now, but it won’t be long before the ex-Miss World and current-Mr. Bollywood Badshah fire up the Jaipur Palace, or more appropriately, our very own blackberry screens, with their sensational nuptials. While I go back to pining for the Buniyaads of the old Dons and marveling at the new Dhooms, do buzz me for when that actually ensues.