Hindi TV Serial - Desi Girl - A new reality show on Imagine TV, getting city girls to live in villages

The majority of India lives in its villages, and the life in villages is very different from that of its towns and cities. There are more activities related to agriculture, farming, animal care, getting water, etc than are present in cities (in fact, some of these activities are not even there in the cities). It is often said that true life in India is like that in the villages, and so you why not come up with a concept where you take city girls, unused to life in the villages, and make them do stuff in the villages and spin a reality show around it. So, you will have activities related to milking cows, dealing with the yuckiness of cow dung (including making cakes from this cow dung), cooking food in the traditional style (without the comfort of modern cooking styles).
So you take 8 glamorous girls from the modern city life (the girls being Sambhavna Seth, Kashmera Shah, Roshni Chopra, Monica Bedi, Anmol Singh, Rucha Gujarati, Ishitta Arun and Aushima Sawhney), and transplant them with rural families. The test - they have to show through numerous tasks that they are suitable for living in the 'real' India.
And then they go through numerous tasks, with a process of elimination removing them from the reality show one by one. Some of the other tasks that they would need to do are: bathing the cows and buffaloes, eating the oily food, washing clothes. In between, you can see that they are not used to doing tasks such as these and complain, but this is the format of the show and they have to do this. And like any other reality show, they all want to win and reach the end.

A sample video from the serial 'Desi girls' on Imagine TV:



Link to more videos on Youtube (link)

Durgesh Nandini on Sony

Imagine making a serial based on a classic, a book by the name of 'Durgesh Nandini', written by the famous Bengali writer, Bankim Chandra Chaterjee. Based on the concept of a village girl with a heart of gold (but seemingly unsophisticated) coming into money and using her power to reform a family of arrogant people. Sounds familiar? I am sure there must have been a couple of movies made on this topic already. Even the recent movie Taxi Number 9211 was about a person being arrogant with his father's wealth, and then the father makes somebody else the trustee for the money.
Duresh Nandini is a relatively new serial, having started earlier this year and coming at 10 PM on Sony. It was interesting initially, but is now slipping down the interest scale, and seems very boring now. The same problem as faced with other serials; if you try to extend a story down many many episodes, you need to make a compromise with the quality of the script and need to keep on inventing many new happenings so that the serial can keep on continuing.


So what is the serial all about ? The Shrivastava family of Dharamadas Shrivastava are multi-millionaires and the 2 sons along with daughter-in-laws are very arrogant. They are so greedy for wealth that they cause the death of their father and illtreat their mother, wanting her to surrender the entire money to them. However, their father has left them a surprise in his will. He knows the nature of his sons, and hence decides to make the trustee of the entire property to be an unknown person, Durgesh Nandini (Rinku Ghosh), an orphan living in a village. The sons are shocked at this, and try to prevent her from knowing about this and reaching the city.
She is however very strong-willed, and wants to carry out the wishes of the late Dharamdas, who wanted her to reform the sons. At the same time, although she has an innate sneakiness, she is not as nasty as the sons and their daughter-in-laws, who will try at nothing to get her removed from the area; by placing money in her office and getting the police to raid, or trying to get her stuck in a situation where the board of the company doubts her competence, or she gets beaten up by irate employees of the company. Of course, since she is the heroine of the serial, she manages to overcome all these traps. But, in normal life, a person having seen so much treachery from people will not keep on letting them do more of such; but react harshly. Do we really have such major do-gooders in real life ?

Jab Love Hua - Does anybody watch this ?

I was trolling around the TV serials after 10:30, and I came across this strange looking serial on Zee TV. It was based around a village, and seemed to have a village bumkin and a smartly dressed girl. Seems interesting .. so much different from the saas bahu kind of serials; and it was interesting, to some extent. Started on April 24, 2006, it appers on Zee TV.
The serial is about a rich girl, Aanya (Priya Badlani) whose family is rich, and she is like any other rich spoiled girl, somewhat of a brat, brash, imperious, sorrounded by luxury. She seems like having it all. However, a turn of fate takes away all this, and she has to go and live in a village. You can imagine the reaction - a city girl in a village. She can't stand the strange ways, and boy, do they consider her strange. Her dressing is so different from the village style, she behaves in ways that are normal to her but are considered so different by the villagers, and maybe they even consider her somewhat more forward than how village belles are supposed to behave.
Then she meets Raghu (Sudeep Sahir), a boy of the village, and they fall in love (well that's how the ads used to put it); but it isn't so simple. He is still a villager, and if I use the term used by city people, something of a bumkin. He works in the fields, dresses as a villager would, and so on. They run into each other a few times, with no obvious reaction.
And this is where it turns corny (or rather, the serial starts to gain strenght), they start to fall for each other over a period of time. His mother is a nice cooperative lady, and she does not do anything against this. However, this is a serial, and you cannot not have evil or somewhat bad characters in the serial, or else the serial will end very fast. So, you have Raghu's dadi coming into the picture suddenly, an imperious lady who does not quite appreciate her grandson contemplating marriage with a shahar ki mem. She tries a lot of things, such as getting in another girl who is more to her taste, and arranging for some crazy competition between the 2 girls to see who can be a better bahu. In addition, there is another comic couple of a town girl and a village lad which is pretty much atrocious.
At this point, the serial started quickly going downhill, and now seems like a forced twist and turn in the story. They are married in the serial now, and are making up some story as they move along. And somehow I end up blaming the Balaji telefilms for all such things, they are the ones who make their serials go on and on by twists in the story, generation time leaps, and so on; and everybody wants to follow in their footsteps. Would it not be good to be able to terminate a serial on time before it starts to turn stale, and you hit the channel change button as soon as the serial starts to come on ?