Doordarshan Nostalgia

Yesterday, I was flipping through the infinite channels on television, and was not able to find one, atleast one show watchable. After taking approximately 12 minutes to find one, I switched it off to float into solitude. I was wondering of the olden days when searching for a smile-evoking show was not that difficult. I wondered how we had survived that era, of the 1980’s. I remember we used to abandon playing cricket and run into Sajith’s house on the ground floor to catch the animated Spiderman at 5.30. At 6 pm, we would be back to where we had started. It was a time when we used to break window panes trying to emulate Sunil Gavaskar or Srikant. A time when we would be crazy about Wimbledon because that was the only place we could see pretty ladies wearing short skirts (Doordarshan used to have a huge censorship board)

I switched the TV on and searched for Doordarshan, and apparently, I did not have it tuned on my television. Such an arrogant treatment to a medium that used to be the only entertainment source in the 80’s I wondered. I can still remember the sequence of programs that used to be played on Doordarshan almost every Sunday. 9 o’clock would start with He-man, 9.30 was a mythological roller-coaster, first Ramayan and then Mahabharat. We would sit and relish magical arrows flying from both sides and blasting off whenever they met. 10.30 would be Potli baba ki, a puppet show that beautifully captured the essence of Alibaba and the forty thieves. And at 11 would be Indradanush, about a boy who was a time traveler. At 1.00 there would be the news for the hearing impaired. I remember, we, trying to mute the television and try to figure out what the gestures were as muted Rini Simon used to read the news.

Doordarshan, I believed in those days, held together the entire country in a cultural code, with its tight ropes on censorship. Who could forget the Chitrahaar and the Chayageet that used to happen on Wednesdays and Fridays, and NDTV’s World this week by Prannoy Roy that changed the perspective of the otherwise mundane Newsreading. Usha Alberqueque, Preet Bedi, Sunit Tandon, Neethi Ravindran, Rini Simon, and the fiery Komal Singh had become household names of those times when everyone waited for the news in English at 8.30 pm to 9.00 PM. Many families used to time their dinners to watch the weekly episodes of Nukkad, Yeh jo hai Zindagi, Karamchand, Intezar, Waghle ki Duniya, Mungerilaal ke haseen sapney, Surabhi, Mirza Ghalib, and the intense story on partition, Tamas. Not to forget Swami of Malgudi Days, and the fiery housewife Rajni. Those were the days when there was quality in the content that we watched and stayed long in our memory. The pull of the content was so strong that we used to wait for the next episode which would be played next week. Sorry for interruption or Rukhawat ke liye khed hai, was one of the most used slates in Doordarshan during those days. Vicco Vajradanthi ads used to be played over and over again for years. The jingles of Nirma, Lijjat Papad, and the Lyril ads never tired us and we ad libed to the jingle as it played. The ads of Nirodh and Mala-D would see the elders, embarrassed, trying to take off our attention from the television by asking someone to check the door as if someone had rung the door bell or check if the fan in the other room was not switched off.

Those were the days when a wind would turn the antenna and we had to go to the terrace and turn it to the direction of the Doordarshan tower, which we used to call as Mecca of the T. V. antennas. Whenever a political hunk would have bade farewell to the world, it was the most boring week for us all, when sad music would emanate from the mono speakers of the television sets.

Today with so many channels and so many shows, mostly unreal reality shows and lousy soap operas, it becomes very difficult to tell one from the other. Even the news channel look like soap operas with each journalistic story extended into a reality show. With a fierce race to garner more TRP’s, I wonder if that era will ever return when television channels would focus on meaningful programming than churning the same old shit they have been churning out over the past few years.

Honestly, even though I love the technological progress that the world is achieving in media and communication, yet, I miss those simple little things one channel used to gift us. Gifts of memories that we all remember fondly, even today.

I do miss Doordarshan. I pressed the search button on the remote trying to tune Doordarshan on my T.V.