THE IDIOT BOX LIVES UP TO ITS NAME.

It was a Friday evening. I was enjoying the free time I had after a long time. It was a particularly enjoyable evening because I was aware of the fact that I could just laze around for the rest of the night, not caring two hoots about homework as the blissful weekend was around the corner where, all I had to do was ‘do nothing.’ I let myself slowly slip away into the vast expanse of nothingness and maybe a small nap when….
‘‘ SELVI,SELVI,SELVI’’ I jumped nearly 4 ft in the air. It was the idiot box blaring on top of its wires, and needless to say it was SUN TV with one of its soaps that had been rude enough to jolt me out of my skin. Annoyed, but at the same time a little intrigued, I moved myself to the couch in the most undignified manner (crawling b’cos I was too lazy to use my legs to their full extent) in the hall and sat down to watch it. Of course, I didn’t know till then that it was sheer retribution to do so because I had rarely watched TV, let alone soap operas as I was a huge fan of reading and it kept me occupied most of the time. I guess it was a quirk of fate and it just wasn’t in my kismet to spend my leisure time productively ’doing nothing’ b’cos, it was a Tamil soap opera that was running on the idiot box.

This is the scene that went on (including a recap of the previous day‘s episode) : mother and father ganging up on the daughter, forcing her to marry the groom they had chosen for her. It is imperative that she marries him because he is rich and they are poor. It really doesn’t matter that the man is already married and has enough wives who could share all his wealth and still have enough left for a few more women. The girl of course is a person of principles and she doesn’t believe in marrying someone just because they are rich. It could have also been that she was in love with another guy- I lost track of the whole thing after awhile. The ‘negotiating’ then turns into an argument where the father suffers a heart attack and is rushed to the hospital. He is almost at death’s door when the daughter very nobly agrees to marry the man her parents choose and , voila! Miracles never cease- the father recovers almost immediately and even goes back to his cigarette smoking, beer drinking ways. That was all I could handle- I left the place , with my head swimming. Does the plot sound boringly familiar to you? It should. You would have probably seen the same plot in a hundred different yet same soaps. By the time the story is into its fiftieth episode you can't remember what the plot was and/or how it started.

It was then I guessed that this was the general theme for most…no, the general theme for all soap operas .

Time has lapsed since SELVI is done and over with (after about a few hundred re-runs on different channels, dubbed in every other vernacular language one could come across ) and has been replaced by a bunch of new ones much to my dismay. Arasi and others are the ’new’ ones, just a few hundred episodes old. They all follow a fairly similar plot...and you get the feeling that even if the characters were interchanged, it wouldn't make any difference whatsoever.

The Hindi ones are no better. They all start with girls being married to men from respectable communities, gal loves husband, husband loves gal, mother-in-law is jealous that son is supposedly paying more attention to his wife(if the mum is so desperate, why even get the son married?) and results in Mother -in-law being cruel to daughter in law who in turn runs off to her parental house. These Hindi ones sound too much like the Tamil ones. Only difference is that the houses and clothes and the abundant jewellery of the people in the Hindi soaps are made up of richer stuff, the mother- in -law is ‘Saas’ instead of ’Athai’ and the absence of a poor father, drowning himself in smoke(or beer, whichever is convenient) .

Tennyson said in his poem Brook ’Men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.’ Whether this is true of a brook or not, It is definitely true of soaps.
‘Generations may come and generations may go, But soaps go on forever.’
Like the title says, the Idiot box has and will continue to live up to its name.