| The last few days have seen the TRP ratings of mega soap operas plunge dramatically, as viewers have switched to watching the unfolding Reliance drama on CNBC and NDTV’s business news.
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| “It’s the refreshing new approach to family melodrama that has me hooked,” pointed out a bored housewife glued to CNBC. “All the other soaps show a saas-bahu spat, and Reliance’s new bhai-bhai issue is a welcome change,” she said. “They should call it, “Woh bhi kabhi bhai tha” (He was once a brother),” she added.
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| A student of Hindi cinema confirmed that the Reliance serial had a novel approach.
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| “Most Hindi movies have two long-lost brothers separated at childhood meeting joyfully in the last scene. The Reliance saga, in stark contrast, is about two brothers who have had enough of each other and yearn to be separated. This is a revolutionary change.”
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| “It’s even better than ‘Murder at the Mutt’,” he added, referring to another popular show.
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| A media analyst, however, was not so sure. “It’s the big numbers that do the trick,” he said, “everybody likes reading or hearing about 70,000 crore rupees or 100,000 crore rupees or other such mind-boggling figures.”
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| Others point out that it isn’t only the soap operas that have lost viewers—even the sports channels have suffered. For example, hardly anybody watched the India-South Africa test, preferring instead to listen for the umpteenth time to Mukesh’s stirring “I am the boss” speech.
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| “It’s like watching a blood sport,” said an ex-cricket fan who says he is now a diehard Reliance enthusiast. “I hope they bring out a video game on the fight soon,” he added. “They could call it ‘Whack-a-Brother’,” he said.
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| There are dissenting views, of course. One group of human rights activists wants the show banned. “The effect it has on impressionable young minds is unwholesome,” ranted one activist.
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| “After watching the last episode the other day my older child refused to share his sweets with his kid brother,” she claimed. MBAs assert, however, that mothers should be happy with their kids grasping the essence of business strategy at such a tender age.
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| It’s a sign of the maturity of the Indian TV viewer that they do not uncritically lap up all that Reliance dishes out. The quality of the dialogue, for instance, has been severely criticised.
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| A line like “there are other issues which are ownership issues, which are in the private domain” is hardly a sparkling piece of prose. “The word ‘issue’ occurs twice in the same sentence, which is not the mark of a good script-writer,” opined a communications specialist.
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| But even he was all praise for Mukesh’s uplifting “I am the boss” speech, so reminiscent, he said, of Marlon Brando in The Godfather. Audience reaction to Anil’s initial reticence was mixed, with some putting it down to laryngitis.
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| His recent speech, however, has had viewers asking for more. “The line ‘There are long hours and there are going to be long days’ is so lyrical,” gushed a co-ed. “It reminds me of Churchill’s ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the streets, we shall never surrender’,” said an Army major, choking with emotion.
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| “That bit about Anil leaving everything to his mother was a real tear-jerker,” interjected a matron, dabbing at her eyes with a frilly handkerchief.
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| “The brothers should make sure that they don’t go to the courts. The courts in India are terribly slow, and it’s easy to lose interest in dry legal detail very fast,” said a couch potato.
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| “Who watches Birla versus Lodha these days,” he asked rhetorically. “Call it something exciting, like Star Wars—The Empire Splits Apart,” said another. A pot-bellied watcher of corporate soaps wanted a more experienced director.
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| “They should get Jackie Chan for the fights,” he said. Meanwhile, hundreds of journalists are working day and night to add spice to the script, carefully blending fact with fiction to make it look like Reality TV.
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| (Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to keep this column unfair, biased, and prejudiced, errors, both of fact and of fiction, could have crept in inadvertently. Neither this writer nor this publication is therefore responsible for any opinions formed or investment decisions made on the basis of this column.) |
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