I read somewhere, “Nothing should live that isn’t a labour of great, great love.” But seriously, if nothing should live that isn’t a labour of great love, how come the people and things that are, sometimes vanish into the mist of time? It’s nothing you haven’t contemplated before. There ought to be some place beyond, a form of continuity that the human mind cannot yet comprehend. It would be too arrogant of us to reject the possibilities that a part of us does go on. And guess what reminds me every day of these possibilities? That great line, a shoe company thought up? Impossible is nothing. This line in a way sums up our Hindi TV soaps. I watch them whenever I can.
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For a while, I was addicted to what people love to call drivel.While feminists accuse soaps of undoing a few decades’ worth of change, I’d prefer us to take a reality check. What change, I ask? As several old Hindi songs and films will testify, the concerns that ail us now were around in the past as well. Stridence may be passé, but we’re saying the same things. A regressive TV soap is reinforcing what is already regressive. It is not creating regression.
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In an apathetic world, a TV soap is a useful thing because it makes you feel something. It is a poke in the ribs of sorts. It shows you what is wrong with us, though in loud, garish colours. So what’s it about soaps that fascinates us? Lot of things. We love to cringe at the sight of over-made up vamps, the sound of over-the-top dialogues and the possibility of an over-the-counter solution to life’s most complicated problem. The End. Death. Yes, supposedly sad endings in soaps keep us glued to our sofas and after the crying and the hysteria is over, we find out, almost always that nothing, not even death in soaps, is quite the ultimate finality, we know it to be in real life. Characters come back to life with plastic surgery, impossible escapes, miraculous revivals. There are plenty of options. My mind opens up a bit more to the possibility that there is someplace safe where our loved ones are having the time of their lives..deaths..whatever. And perhaps watching soaps starring the living. I love the idea.
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Seetal Iyer is the co-founder and content head at Timbre Media and one of the most well-loved radio voices for over 15 years and counting.