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 ?

Using one's own serial for advertising

For a person not familiar with the goings-on in the media industry, this was pretty interesting in terms of strategy. In the past, on Star Plus, I have normally seen that when a new serial is about to be introduced, the buzz for the serial starts on the channel much before in terms of teasers and ads. Which is all well and fine. But, when a regular 30 minute serial is taken, which already has time cut due to ads, explanation of what happened in the serial in the past, we are left with around 20 minutes. And now, here is what Balaji Telefims did.
Balaji Telefilms makes popular teleserials appearing at prime time, at the 10 - 11 PM slot on Star Plus. It also was the producer of the recent movie called 'Shootout at Lokhandwala', with a large star cast - namely, Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Vivek Oberoi, Suniel Shetty, Arbaaz Khan, and gentleman called Tusshar Kapoor (who incidentally happens to be the brother of the main person behind Balaji Telefilms (Ekta Kapoor)).
I am not going to do a review of the movie here, but recent comments from people who have seen it was not very complimentary. So here I was watching this serial at prime time, and what do I suddenly see ? A discussion suddenly started on watching a film, and what do you observe ? One character telling the other than a good movie to see is 'Shootout at Lokhandwala', having some excellent characters and with some very good performance by Tusshar Kapoor.
Now, Ekta Kapoor is entitled to praise whom she wants in her serials, but it was very strange. Such open promotion of a movie seems almost mercenary, given that the script (if any) of the serial would have to be changed to accomodate this praise. Other people present in the room had that strange look in their face, 'How did that dialogue get in there?'. And then burst out laughing when this strange incident in the episode finally ended.
I wonder whether Star Plus was actually a party to this ? I do not know how they would benefit from such open advertising ? Somehow I ended up comparing serials that show up on the English side, and I have never seen anything like this, so maybe this is an Indian innovation. Did people notice this particular scene ?

India TV: A news channel with a difference

In office, the discussion around the lunch table typically is about what's the next news on India TV (or what the last interesting news was). India currently has a large number of news channels, and when some major event takes place, all the channels concentrate on that. So, for example, when the blasts happened in UP, this was covered on all the channels, and was only replaced when Maninder Singh was caught with cocaine, and there was the sight of each channel trying to find their own set of people to interview, including people on the sight, former cricketers, and so on. The one glorious exception to this entire new coverage was the news on India TV.
India TV seems to have a found a niche of its own. It tries to cover sensational news, leaving behind the likes of Star News and Aaj Tak. So, for example, India TV was the first channel to investigate and find the news about an illicit sex racket running on the premier Rajdhani trains, it periodically covers tales of haunted places, about other sex rackets running with plenty of description (in fact, on a lighter note, a friend of mine got a blasting from his wife for watching such a sleazy channel when she occassioned to see some of the coverage, but he managed to wriggle out of this situation by explaining it as a national TV channel). At another time, the channel was trying to run a story about a ichadari (snake that can change shape and become a human being as well) snake as well. Similarly, late at night, they have a discussion where they get doctors and advisors and get people to phone in and talk about their sex related problems.
So I normally do not have much of a tolerance for such kind of news, but this seemed interesting enough that I thought that I would try it out. Today afternoon, I switched to India TV, and found them running an exclusive on a snake couple writhing together in the water somewhere in Madhya Pradesh. This was running for around the 3-4 minutes that I was watching the channel, and this seemed fairly interesting :-). In the night, I ran into something that seemed far more stable, this was Rajat Sharma interviewing Rakhi Sawant on his adalat program.
Overall, the more I thought about it, the makers of India TV seem to be making a hit out of the attempts to make it a niche channel, abandoning too much serious news. After all, if people know about it as a distinctive channel out of the so many news channel out there, and talk about it to each other, then it is a success. And people need a break from serious disaster news.
Maybe I will end up watching it more often, we all need a break from serious stuff going all around us.

The biggest loser on Sahara: Should we have such programs ?

In the line of reality programmes that are popping up left, right and center, add a new one. This is a program called 'The Biggest Loser' airing on Sahara One on Friday, Saturday and Sunday right after Sahara's most popular serial 'Woh Rehne Waali Mehlon ki". All of the reality shows draw inspiration from the success of the original KBC on Star Plus that not only got very high ratings, but even pulled up other shows on the same channel. The biggest Loser is a copy of an international program that first started in 2004.
So what is the biggest loser all about ? It is about bringing together 2 teams of 16 people in total, and forming the Red team and the Blue team. For star quotient, you have Suneil Shetty as a fading Bollywood celebrity. These teams are under the control of personal trainers who make them follow a regime of diet and exercise in order to weight lose. But not everything is nice and sweet. The teams will be weighed every day, and the team that loses less weight at the end of the week will have to remove 1 player from their team till there are only 3 people left as finalists, and the ultimate winner will get the grand prize.
The program has got a heavy boost of advertising, with a lot of promos before the start of the show, and even now, there is an incredible amount of advertising on FM radio. Sahara really seems to believe that this will be the show that will bring it up. When you watch the show, already one person has been kicked out, and some of my worst fears are coming to light.
In order to make this a selling program, they will have to put in a large amount of emotion and drama, and you can assume that with the lure of money, there will be a lot of peer pressure, especially in a situation where one person can be seen as making a team fail.
So what are the things that can go wrong:
- Weight loss and gain is a very person dependent nature. It is nice to say that if a person eats less and does more exercise, then there will be a weight loss. This is however a very simplistic statement. Weight loss depends on a person's biology, their metabolic clock, and so on.
- Point related to the one above. People can not lose weight for weeks under a strict regime, and then start losing weight suddenly. Under the program situation, such a person would get kicked out very quickly.
- In India, people who are fat or obese suffer a lot of social pressure, with total strangers coming to them and offering about how to lose weight; if they go to social occasions where there is food, people will admonish them to eat less, and so on. In such situations, if a person gets kicked out for not losing weight,
then it is very likely that a person can conclude that even with trainers and diet regime, it is impossible to lose weight and be extremely disappointed.
- Slim people watching this show are more likely to go to fatter people and offer even more advise such as getting trainers or controlling their diet.
- There is a real risk of biological damage under a harsh regime. The human body needs to slowly settle into a new regime, not suddenly be exposed to massive changes. Under channel pressure, even expert trainers could be provoked into pushing these people much harder than necessary.
- One is not sure about the level of safety in such programmes. If you read this article by Sakshi, then you can see that unsafe events are happening.
There are some plus points of the programme, such as maybe pushing more people to take care of their bodies, but my overall impression is that of a channel willing to do anything to gain more ratings.