Are these women for real?

She���s been a journalist, a doctor, a single mom raising kids and dealing with a broken marriage. She used to be a small town girl with dreams of braving the big city blues too.
That was television for you in the 90s with bold themes and brave women. Starting from Rajni, front-runners like Tara, Banegi Apni Baat, Saans, Hasratein, Astitva: Ek Prem Kahani ��� women had a larger canvas on which they cast a magical spell.
So what ails our TV soaps now? Are the designer-saree/salwar-kameez clad weeping beauties, whose only karma in life seems to be arguing with the ���bad��� girl (could be a vicious, manipulative in-law or a beloved���s girlfriend) for real?
In the maze of the saas-bahu-ghar ki beti soaps, have the spunky, spirited women in television been relegated to the background and eased out of screen? Or do they continue to appear, even if in bits? Actor Varun Badola who was part of women-oriented serials like Koshish ���Ek Asha and Astitva: Ek Prem Kahani is of the opinion that, ���Female protagonists had a power of their own, they epitomised shakti. All that has become a thing of the past on television. With actors having to work two shifts a day, production houses gunning for a 20-episode story bank, and scripts lacking in creativity, quality has become the casualty.���
Industry experts confess that television viewership has changed over the years and portrayal of women has been redefined to suit the popular taste. Not that it���s a trend everyone likes. Mandira Bedi who essayed the role of Shanti (in the daily soap, of the same name) feels the need of the day is to ���have iconic characters that youngsters can identify with. Women characters in most channels are typecast. Shouldn���t we have characters worth emulating?���
Even though the serials today still revolve around the female protagonist, in the race to grab TRPs, television has been creating unreal prototypes. Shefali Shah, who was part of the hugely popular sitcom Banegi Apni Baat says, ���Earlier, sitcoms used to be weeklies, now these are dailies. In order to bring a glam quotient to everyday life, the serials depict characters in an unreal manner. We could match our accessories to our sarees, shoot a scene and go home. That���s how things work in the television industry today. ���
According to actor Supriya Pilgaonkar, ���There are certain roles, which have already set benchmarks, like Kavita Chowdhary in Udaan. Unfortunately, the consumer preference has changed. In fact, the popularity of the shows depicting women leading by example totally lies in the hands of viewers.��� Nevertheless, the woman of substance who a viewer can relate does exist, feels Pilgaonkar. On stereotyping women, actor Meenal Patel says, ���We do find instances wherein women are not stereotyped. Some of the characters sketched are close to the average Indian woman like that of Pankor Joshi (Jasuben Jayantilal Joshi Ki Joint Family) whose feelings are not hidden underneath a gossamer.���
While their erstwhile counterparts were spontaneous and career oriented, today small screen women are passive beings oscillating between kitchen politics and broken marriages. With TRPs of long running soap sagas dipping, reality shows going through format hiccups and redundancy setting in on Indian television, we wonder when the channels would care to read the signs?