CHANNEL SURFER
Children today are inheriting contradictory values from popular media
India has well and truly entered the ‘Age of Tinsel Values’ wherein form is
more important than content. Glitzier the form, the more voluble the public
response, as demonstrated by our ‘thinking’ people, who hang on to every word
dripping down an actor’s glamorous lips. Genuine social reformers have been
pushed into a corner. Be that as it may, Satyamev Jayate,
"Truth alone triumphs", is today’s reality; a TV show that brings
societal pathos into our drawing rooms while keeping the reality’s tactile
stink at bay.
But Satyamev Jayate is also a Sanskrit aphorism, which is
taken with fistfuls of salt and dollops of cynicism today. After a long battle
of attrition, truth’s triumph over falsehood invariably turns out to be
symbolic and pyrrhic.
Witness the three women in Satyamev Jayate’s inaugural episode
of May 6: Amisha Yagnik, Parveen Khan and Mitu Khurana. The three women had
suffered at the hands of their husbands or in-laws. But the show’s major
infirmity is the absence of counterpoints from their respective husbands/kin-in-law.
Then, there were clips of a sting operation on female foeticide. This,
however, did not move Rajasthan’s Chief Minister to take action against the
killer medicos.
The second episode on May 13 focused on child abuse. Among other things,
Aamir Khan’s interaction with children in the episode left one wondering. The
children were from the upper middle class stratum where vulnerability to sexual
abuse is less when compared to, say, lower socio-economic strata; the plight of
street children is pathetic. All advice given by him would have gone over the
heads of children from the poorer classes - assuming that they were able to see
the show.
On the same day at 8 pm, Sony premiered the Kareena Kapoor-Imran
Khan-starrer Ekk Main Aur Ekk Tu. Without any warning from the
censor bosses or the TV channel, we watched, in a party scene at the film’s
beginning, a matronly lady touch Imran’s derriere in the most improper manner,
while winking lewdly.
Surfing channels, one found Zee TV's reality show, Dance India
Dance, featuring child artistes. A five-year-old girl shakes her hips,
spreads her arms to do belly dance while shaking something that was absent in
the anatomy of a child of her age, and winks suggestively. In reply to the
judges’ query, she innocently gives full credit to her mother.
To what purpose Aamir's pontifications when the common child is inheriting
contrary values from the popular media? He advised the children in his show on
what comprised inappropriate touching; that they should report to the adult
they trusted if anybody resorted to such indecent behavior. Well, one wonders
whether the children participating in Zee TV’s DID, or watching
Sony TV’s Kareena-Imran starrer, wouldn’t look upon Aamir as someone who has
gone spectacularly off his rocker.
The show’s May 20 episode focused on dowry. Aamir interviewed the girls who
had suffered brutalities on this count. But there was also the spunky Rani who
had exposed her would-be in-laws to the media.
Moreover, in Bhivandi, community elders have banned all ostentatious
weddings. Women from the North-East asserted that dowry system doesn’t exist
there. Interestingly, a Bihari boy narrated how he was abducted and forcibly
married to his present wife; sans dowry. Committing crime to fight an illegal
tradition?
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