General

When celebrities or politicians make controversial remarks on the erosion of family values, they pick up an [un]usual pointer to drive home their point: the actions of a character in a TV comedy series. In reality, however, there's more to it than what meets the small screen.

Maybe, the idea would not really gel, whether or not you are a TV fan. So, for the sake of argument, let’s cull a remarkable example. There was, at one time, a major sense of loss following the untimely adieu, for whatever reason, of Wagle Ki Duniya [Mr Wagle’s World], a marvellous entertainer, which, in some ways, embodied TV’s ubiquitous appeal over the language barrier. Wagle Ki Duniya was as much loved in North India as it was in the South.

The inference is simple: there's been one social force that, more than any other, has conducted a sort of free-floating -- a psychological -- dialogue with us all, more so within our family. It’s the one that’s influencing, reflecting, and refracting the other. Its identity: TV, what else? It’s a propelling force -- a coincidence of technology. Yet, there’s a paradox. Force or no force, TV was bound up with the family from the very beginning.

In its initial glut, TV seemed to be just one more essentiality in a long line of mechanical devices -- one for home entertainment. Soon, its impact was tremendous. It began to fulfil a cultural function -- a way in which family values could be acted out and maintained. By 1990, TV was installed in more than two-thirds of the India’s homes. Its presence today is anybody’s guess, what with an average person watching at least four hours of TV a day. Also, TV’s glowing effect is now so profound that you need not even leave it to eat.

We all know that TV is no panacea. You also need not be a social scientist, newspaper critic etc., to become aware of its dark side, too. TV has not only eroded values, it has also tended to crowd out old-fashioned conversation, and more wholesome amusements like reading. Family members have now retreated into a cocoon to watch separate programmes. TV today seems to chomp up so much of our time, leaving the addict bleary-eyed, and restless. Yet, not many people complain.

It’s a monumental cultural wasteland on TV -- a travesty of game shows, violence, sadism, murder, bad men, good men, private detectives, cartoons and endless commercials -- of screaming presenters, tacky shows, cajoling and offensive. Compare it with the movies. It’s almost ditto. The only difference, perhaps, is TV happens to be domestic. Yet, the staple diet of TV programmes has turned out to be more of mild comedy -- if you can call it comedy -- about extraordinary families. It is what we call as sitcom: a matter of economics, given the sheer volume of “pro-gaming,” or an electronic hearth, where people don’t really like to watch themselves up on the screen.

Most TV programmes are “parodies” today, not dramas. They also often display a high level of tension, frustration, and conflict within the family. Somehow. The norm is middle to upper middle, or high, class families that often live in plush homes in virtually interchangeable suburbs. Popular culture, as everyone knows, works in strange ways, and it’s no coincidence that cracks have become commonplace in every picture window -- more so, in TV’s depiction of the family being resolute, insistent, and almost blind to any flaws.

That TV is wearing blinders is now passé.  It makes a case for a host of treatments, with issues, both good and bad. It wants to be, therefore, subtle. Hence, the common trend: most TV folks think that the only way TV could touch upon this charged atmosphere is through an extreme route -- indirectly. Which is also one primal reason why many TV serials look like documentaries with a message: a message, which is clichéd. So, every sitcom allows the camera to reveal how deeply and irrevocably the notion of a family as a private sanctuary has unravelled, with all its moles and fissures. Still, it’s not everything. You can’t, obviously, solve problems in twenty-three minutes. That would call for miracles -- miracles out of bounds even from the technological angle, or nirvana.

Agreed that in more recent times, TV comedy shows have turned their back on the contemporary family.  Yet, TV has scored a facile victory in the slapstick category -- a genre of unprecedented staying power. Its basic formula is of a group of unrelated people coming together in an ersatz family. To cull an old, and a more recent paradigm: Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi [This Is Life], India’s first, and great, comedy show, and Dekh Bhai Dekh [Look Brother, Look]. Their mores have, in more ways than one, allowed for a diversity of family representations on TV.

There’s no denying the fact that there are any number of shows, on TV today, that are unusual, outlandish, and utterly hackneyed. However, it is heartening to see that mounting desperation has led some TV producers and directors to go in for something new -- a variation. As of now, TV’s decision to let a thousand families bloom must also invite us to recognise a new and uncertain gender and parental role: a fall from statistical pre-eminence of the traditional family.

We all know that the early hopes of TV as an agent of family unity have not achieved fruition.  What’s more, TV’s one of the things that is keeping families apart, thanks to the growing number of channels. With a few exceptions, every piece of TV programme today is geared to a specific age. So, the odds don’t really favour a whole group sitting together to watch a programme. It doesn’t happen at your home. How can it happen elsewhere?

There we are, with not more than a few illusions about TV, today. This itself is a very heartening change. We also no longer have the delusion that the box, managed by highly qualified professionals, would solve [y]our family’s problems. So, if anybody’s ever going to do that, it’s going to have to be us. Set out, and deduce!

Well, if we can’t do that, we have a choice: forget about change, and switch off your set. For one simple reason: comedy, as William Shakespeare and Mark Twain, or India’s greatest cartoonist, R K Laxman, understood, or understand, need not be docile and insipid.