Foreign Bodies

Typically, she slides into a bar, where our two hot-blooded Indians in suits are already parked. They immediately do what every virile Indian male is supposed to do: lust for her bust. Fortunately for Mr.Virility seated next to her, when he paws her hand, she claws it in her clasp. He’s beside himself with, well whatever and pants for a dance. She agrees. Mr Virility is a trifle short. Here, it’s an asset because his hand is at just the right height to staple her derriere and his head to rest upon her bosom.

A modern, young foreign woman permitting such puerile sexual advances?

Actually, she’s feeling him up too but with the sole intention of relieving his back pocket of its wallet.

At this opportune moment, the electricity went off. Mausam seems more predictable than the weather.

In Yehi Hai Zindagi (Zee), Satish Shah was wearing said light brown toupee and playing himself as an American in Saffron. His robes were the funniest thing in the serial. There’s a combination of poor acting and poorer script-writing that is killing it: the jokes, if one can dignify them with that title, are such that if the canned laughter didn’t come on, we’d not be able to identify them.

Which brings us rather naturally to the portrayal of foreigners in our serials. So unreal. Everyone knows they’re Indians pretending to be Indians as foreigners. This year, we’ve had a number of serials devoted to the freedom struggle — for example, Farz, Yug (DD1), Jhoota Sach (Zee) and Gaatha-Viruddh (STAR Plus). In each instance, the British characters speak pidgeon Hindi which is as false as the wigs on their heads. The unspoken but tacit assumption is that viewers know these Englishmen/women are Indians, and suspend disbelief. Maybe, but the characterisation is so completely one-dimensional and unconvincing that you can’t accept these rotten eggs saying rotten things (they only speak and behave rottenly). If Peter Sellers was meant to be the cruellest joke on India, then we’re returning the insult with our portrayal of the British.

That leads us upto Sony’s American serial, Mad About You. It is dubbed. This is what gets you so mad about Sony: it has these entertaining English language serials and out of some perverse pleasure it goes and dubs them in Hindi. To reach out to the public at large. Which is all very well, but for `people like us’ it’s a travesty. Why can’t Sony telecast the original and repeat a dubbed version?

Because, as of now, the serial is not as hilarious as we’ve been given to understand by the American media. Or it’s been short-changed in the dubbing. It still looks funny but the little misunderstandings between a newly-wed couple in New York are lost in the dubbing: the repartee is like-that, so there’s no time to stop and translate.

Maybe this is why DD1 remains convinced that Indians — as in the masses and not the middle classes — are better off with fantasies and that opium — religion. Films, mythologicals, fantasies, and history as myth: Om Namah Shivay, Shri Krishna, Jai Hanuman, Shaktimaan, Maharana Pratap… An old battle horse like Junoon is keeping its end up and there’s Usool on Thursdays but otherwise drama serials are dead on DD. The thinking appears to be that women receive their daily dose of drama during the day with the soaps and therefore, evening prime time should be devoted to higher or lower forms of entertainment! Comic book cut-outs of our great gods and filmi chakkars fill the screen in order to keep the people’s minds off the abject quality of their existence. Poor people.