Its a nice sunday afternoon and you are just done with a family lunch. Then you get to your fav place in the drawing room and get glued to the television. It hasnt been a few minutes of visual joy, when the screen goes abruptly still! (much like the blue screen of death in Windows) And then there is a flash with the very familiar words:
'Rukawat ke liye khed hai'.....
Rings a bell?
And the 'Guilt at the Stoppage' doesn't stop there. Its very smoothly followed by a black-and-white mesh of haywire pixels, juxtaposed with a sound which is oddly similar to heavy rain falling on a metal sheet.
No other channels to jump to, the disappointed yet hopeful spectator had nothing else to do but to wait till the black-and-white rain subsided.
Circa early 80s: Television had arrived!
Its difficult to forget the eerie DD signature tune that reminded of graveyards and the ugly-looking DD logo that looked more like a top-view of a Mexican hat gone slightly awry. See that and you will agree >>
And what characters! The kid called Swami in small town South-India, the carrot-eating investigator, the forgetful day-dreamer, the Sherlock-Holmes-styled white-clad bengali detective, the huge bunch of myriad characters at a roadside corner (nukkad), white-haired ghosts taking a ride on the shoulders of unnerved Kings, bunch of youth hanging out on campus, a prime-minister telling us stories of India's glorious past, families with a member-count higher than the population of Australia, and badly-done special-effects of mythological characters throwing at each other, weapons of every possible dimension.... just to name a few. They were the ones who made the evenings and Sundays enjoyable for every middle-class home in India.
So starved were we of motion pictures or anything remotely similar, that on lazy Sunday afternoons, we ended up watching regional-language movies (forget about understanding a word of it), and even news bulletins for the deaf-and-dumb!! Now thats desperation.
These were just a few lines about the hey-days of old-time idiot-box, fully garnished with doses of nostalgia and memorabilia.... but hey, don't pull out your tissues or mom's pickles just yet.
On a philosophical note, the memories remain at their pedestal, as long as they are those faint memories. The moment you take them out of the grandma's closet and wham - there goes the charm! It hits you right there in the face that something which you always cherished from the past, actually tips precariously towards mediocrity, and towards a big disconnect with the immediate present.
But more about that later...
(Next post - a few of the favorite old-time shows...)
