Samaaj seva on TV

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Top and bottom: Stills from Dil Ke Nazar Se Khoobsurat

I am fully fed up of people who start howling the moment anyone mentions desi soaps. Yeh woh log hain who sometimes watch Grey’s Anatomy and Homeland, but never any show where women dress up as if they are late for their shaadi ka mandap.

Ask them about that joke which Joey cracked in Friends’ episode No. 120, and they’ll recall the scene with incredible clarity and details. But ask them what Anandi is up to these days and they start howling again. Indian serials are unbearable, they murmur between heart-wrenching sobs.
For no good reason in logon ne hamare desi serials ko badnam kiya hua hai. If this howling brigade gives our shows a chance, they will realise how committed Indian TV is to samaaj seva and jan kalyan.
Indian television’s number one agenda is to reflect and reinforce the great Indian values and traditions. That’s why Star TV, Indian paramparas ka prime rakhwala, operates like The National Training School for Saases & Bahus of India. Most of its shows celebrate feminist annual functions like Karva Chauth and all of them encourage women to marry men they have not met. This is the traditional Indian way of procreation, where a member of the male species and a member of the female species meet on a bed decked with flowers, while giggling girls outside whisper naughty-naughty things to egg on bhabhi and bhaiyya.
Take Balika Vadhu (Colors). This show beautifully explains how a rich family must buy a nabalik girl from a poor family and then mistreat her, to inculcate deep gratitude. And now we’ve got a new serial, Dil Ki Nazar Se Khoobsurat (Sony), which is dedicated to explaining and encouraging colourful bhed-bhav.
This show has taken up the cudgels on behalf of the white-white, gore-gore people and is determined to show that brown-brown, sanvale-sanvale people must be practical and stop looking for beauty on their outside. They must focus, instead, on developing inner beauty.
There are two houses, one where white-white people laugh and be merry, and the other where brown-brown people brood over their sad-sad lives. In white people’s house, father and mother of Aaradhya, who is the whitest of them all, laugh hysterically every time she sees brown-brown people and starts shrieking.
In the deeply depressed brown people’s house, Principal Bharti lives with her son, Madhav. Now Madhav, who has been in shock since his kindergarten days when little Aaradhya stormed off stage after screaming “brown boo, brown boo”, doesn’t like to appear in public. So he is a radio jockey who lives with his self-loathing. His white dost Rahul tries to tell him that all this white-white, brown-brown talk is nonsense, but, fortunately, Madhav ignores him. Because the fact is that all brown people must wake up to the reality. Only then can they unleash their inner beauty, and only then can brown boy find a white girl. Only by channeling dil ki khoobsurati.