The wonder years

50 years of Doordarshan : an unabashed, nostalgic tribute to the golden years of Doordarshan – published in the November issue of FlyLite, the inflight magazine of Jet Lite.

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It is a late Wednesday evening over three decades ago, in a suburban home in Chennai. The family has had an early dinner and is sitting in front of the television set. The doorbell rings, keeps ringing, as neighbours walk in sheepishly one after the other. The early ones take their places on the empty chairs while the others sit on the floor mats the lady of the house has set out in anticipation. The conversation is desultory, the adults tossing out wisecracks on the latest news being read out. The children are playing among themselves and the child of this TV-owning household clearly enjoys a superior status in this group.

And there is suddenly a hush; Chitrahaar has begun. Yet another weekly ritual is being honoured, to everyone’s satisfaction.

The child is me, thirty years ago. As I learn from assorted discussions with friends on this subject, it could have just as easily been anyone from the generation born around that time. It was the era of single channel television with limited transmission timing (roughly four hours), grainy black and white images and constant disruptions accompanied by a rueful ‘rukawat ke liye khed hai’ (Sorry for the interruption) message. Yet, the very mention of the wonder years of television, the Doordarshan days is enough to set people off on a happy down-memory-lane trip.

So what is it about Doordarshan that makes for such great nostalgia? I did some quick research with my co-generationists (to coin a term) to find some answers.

What worked for Doordarshan?

In any communication medium, content is king, we hear all the time. In the glorious days of Doordarshan (say, early to mid 80s), it was indeed so. “I think a lot of it had to do with pure artistic expression.There was no market research, and no ratings war to lead to the lowest common denominator game. A lot of talent from the strong parallel cinema movement of the eighties got involved with the telly and just did great work”, says Abu Mallick, a senior advertising professional.

It is also a general belief that the programming was more realistic, with stories that resonated with different kinds of audiences. It was not about garish sets, perfectly made up women (how do they stay that way all the time?), swish pan shots and dramatic music. There was a variety in the content provided and each program had a distinct tone and look. Compare that with current television programming; the common lament of “now everything feels like a saas bahu serial” sums it up. Most soaps (barring marathons like ‘Hum Log’ that ran for 156 episodes) were time-bound; they had to tell the story, and tell it in a compelling manner in 13 or 26 episodes. For the audiences, this made it easier to get involved and stay involved. “If I missed an episode, I knew I had missed a vital part of the story. Unlike now where I can miss a few and know the story has not moved an inch”, says an avid soap-watching friend.

And finally, watching Doordarshan was a family, to-do-together activity. It was something to look forward to – fidgeting through the advertisements waiting for Chitrahaar, suspending all activity on Sunday mornings just before Ramayana time, or eagerly awaiting another telecast of ‘Miley Sur Mera Tumhara’. Neelesh Misra, Deputy Executive Editor with the Hindustan Times writes about this in a piece called Inside the idiot box of memory “I would switch on the thick cylindrical silver knob of the Uptron Urvashi TV set, encased in a wooden cabinet. Vertical vibgyor colour bands would show up, and then, suddenly, the rotating Doordarshan logo that seemed to us like two huge kajus hugging a rasgulla in the centre. Sublime, pre-24X7 moment. The moment my brother and I would have waited for the whole day, killing time to prepare ourselves to open the rolling wooden shutter on the TV cabinet”.

Now with a (bordering on the unmanageable) choice of channels and programmes, more exposure to Western television shows and culture in general, the fare offered by Doordarshan seems simplistic and naive in retrospect; we took what was offered, cynics would say. However, for most of that generation, nostalgia for Doordarshan is not about thinking back on a mass medium, but about reflecting on, and possibly longing for a time that was somehow more innocent. After all, when the rest of the state was out agitating against Hindi, that neighbourhood, and a hundred others like it in Chennai, gathered together to watch Chitrahaar every week.

Box1: Some evergreen DD favourites

*Nukkad : The bittersweet stories from the lives of unforgettable characters like Guru, Radha, teacherji and Khopdi.
*Buniyaad / Hum Log : India’s first mega-serials, portraying the lives of the “middle-class”, the former sketching the path of a family caught in the Partition.
*Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi : The sitcom based on the lives of Ranjit, Renu and her brother Raja that had most of India in splits every Friday.
*Malgudi Days : Based on R.K.Narayan’s books and directed by Shankar Nag, this serial captured the trials and tribulations of young Swami and his friends.
*Chitrahaar / Rangoli : The weekly doses of popular Hindi film music, long before the era of jazzy and incessant music videos.

The Honorable Mentions include these serials – Byomkesh Bakshi / Karamchand, I Love Lucy, Giant Robot, Mahabharat / Ramayana, Surbhi, Udaan / Rajni, Tamas – and these ‘public service’ advertisements that remain fresh in audience memory Ek Anek, Miley Sur Mera Tumhara, Spirit of Unity run.

Box 2: Evolution of the idiot box in India

*1959: Television first comes to India through a grant from UNESCO which included 180 Philips television sets. Transmission was twice a week, twenty minutes each time, and could be viewed only on community TV sets in and around Delhi.
*1965: Regular daily transmission starts as part of All India Radio, with a strong pro-development vision.
*1972: Transmission is extended to Mumbai, followed by Kolkata and Chennai in 1975.
*1976: Indira Gandhi goes on air to announce the separation of Doordarshan from All India Radio.
*1982: India hosts the Asiad Games in Delhi, and millions of Indians discover colour television.
*1991: India sees first cable telecast, followed a year later by the launch of Zee TV. Within a year, 25 lakh households have a TV set.

TV trivia

* The original signature tune for Doordarshan was composed by Pt. Ravi Shankar and the logo was made by a student from the National Institute of Design (NID) as part of a class assignment.
* The title song of the popular sitcom Yeh jo hai zindagi was sung by Kishore Kumar.
* The televised version of the Mahabharat directed by B.R.Chopra enjoyed 96% viewership (over a 110 million viewers each week), a record high for any television programme in the world.
* Hum Log was the first serial, in 1984, to be sponsored commercially – the company was Nestle, and the brand, Maggi Noodles
* Television artists who went on to become famous film-stars include Smita Patil (she was a newsreader with Mumbai DD) and ShahRukh Khan (he played the charming Abhimanyu Rai in Fauji).