Paradise Lost (no reference to Milton)

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Women are evil...!

Umm...that doesn’t sound right, does it? In fact, I suppose it sounds obnoxious and totally MCPish! Ok, let me rephrase that, “Indian women are evil.” Yes, you read that right, evil. Now why would I say something so mean and dastardly? Blame Ekta Kapoor and her media kin for this strong emotion!

Home was always this wonderful place, like paradise, with an abundant supply of food and you never had to pay for a meal afterwards! Lounging on the couch watching some random stuff on tv with a plate full of munchies always accessible. The simple pleasures of home! Of late, however, this paradise has been ruined by the above mentioned story teller and her sordid stories. Now when I come home, I see these women dressed to the teeth in ornate sarees and jewellery, constantly plotting to ruin another woman’s life with immense satisfaction.

I remember years ago, there was this soap called “Tara”. It was my first encounter with this kind of torture. Wikipedia has an entry on it claiming that it ran for five long years! FIVE YEARS! It was the birth of a new genre in Indian television, as wiki says, “first ever contemporary Indian soap on women.” And man, did they highlight the plight of the “Indian women”!!!

There is a new trend I noticed. Most soaps now have characters “attempting” to speak either in Marwari or Bhojpuri and trust me, they do a miserable job at it. Instead of Bhojpuri, they’re speaking some weird mix of that and Hindi. So, like I was saying earlier, Women are EVIL! Well, the soap opera women definitely are. In one soap, one of the daughter-in-law (DiL) is constantly plotting and screwing with the lives of the rest of the family. In another, the protagonist is a girl who’s a victim of child marriage. All through the episodes, they keep flashing socially relevant messages about the ills of such things. Eventually, she’s shot in the head, actually, the forehead; right in the centre of it too. Unbelievably, she doesn’t die on the spot (as most snipers would have us believe). Instead, she just slips in to a coma. After this episode, I saw promo videos where the reel parents of the girl ask viewers to pray for her well being! Un-F***ing-believable! What’s more outrageous is that she actually comes out of the coma!

It’s a pity really. A whole nation crazy about such nonsense. Instead of doing something productive or even watching something productive on tv, thousands of people just sit like morons in front of the idiot box, wasting their lives, their time and their sanity! To sum it up, women in the physical world are NOT evil (most of them, atleast) but the ones in these soaps most definitely are. All of these soaps play on the emotions of thousands of women who exist in two worlds, one where they want to be like the strong and heroic protagonist in the soaps and the other, where they have to come to terms with real life, in a society which still binds them to irrational rules and regulations.

I hope that someday, better sense will prevail. Till then, God save my Paradise!