Serial crises

Recently, while peacefully snoozing to the background noise of a TV serial in an 11th-floor Bangalore hospital room where the spouse had been admitted for a week, i woke up when she suddenly said, "Call the doctor! Call the doctor!" I anxiously asked her what the problem was. And she said, "The old man's having an attack," indicating the TV serial where an old man was gasping on a bed while surrounded by wailing relatives.
When Shakespeare's melancholy Jacques talked about the seven ages in the life of men and women, the one thing he did not mention — perhaps because there was no television then — was the post-retirement stage when people would be utterly focussed on the problems faced by TV serial protagonists.With the nation's potholes masquerading as roads and the traffic tying itself in knots, more and more Indians spend their evenings watching TV serials instead of the erstwhile escapist preference of movies in theatres.
There is an element of compulsiveness in watching Indian TV serials where the protagonist — usually a Pretty Young Thing (PYT) with whom everyone empathises — is confronted with a sea of troubles. Instead of soliloquising on this existential angst like Hamlet, our PYT solves one problem after the other without asking God or the director why she alone should be subjected to so many hassles.
With Indian cricket plumbing new lows on the just ended tour of England, even retired senior citizens who have played the game with distinction at the university level are opting for TV serials. My septuagenarian neighbour, Shankar, who was known to never skip the telecast of a match, now makes it a point to never miss the evening serials. On those rare occasions when he misses the serial action, he rings up his sister in Kerala to get an update on how the PYT has managed to resolve the earlier crisis and the latest problem she is facing.
And there is no shortage of problems for PYTs on Indian serials. Take a leading TV channel in Chennai where, at 6.30 pm, PYT Madhavi can be seen in jail after being arrested for a murder she did not commit. Madhavi — who sings for a living and is engaged to a dynamic young IAS officer, Manohar — had earlier been kidnapped by a dastardly villain who wants to marry off his daughter Aruna to the heroine's fiance once he tops the civil service exams. And so what if Madhavi has skimped and sung just to finance Manohar's IAS coaching classes!
Just as complicated are the problems faced at 9 pm by PYT Tulsi (an engineering student who is ill-treated first by her stepmother and then by her mother-in-law) and at 9.30 pm by PYT Chellame (who gives birth to twin daughters, one of whom is kidnapped from the hospital and farmed out to a professional beggar and whom she keeps meeting at street-corners without recognising her because she has been told the other child is no more).
With these serials being dubbed in all other south Indian languages on channels owned by the Chennai-based TV network, Shankar and millions of viewers south of the Vindhyas would be moved by the plight of the same PYTs, i told myself while reclining in the hospital room armchair. And i even remembered an aged aunt-in-law (or ancient relative as P G Wodehouse would have termed her) who refused to move with her daughter and son-in-law from Chennai to Bhubaneswar because she just could not tear herself away from her favourite TV serial characters.
"Close the door, close the door," the better half said just then. "It's already closed," i assured her. And then i realised that she was advising PYT Archana's mother in the 8 pm serial to keep the bedroom door closed so that the treacherous sister-in-law who was lurking in the vicinity would not overhear the all-important secret which was just about to be revealed!