Golden Era of Doordarshan!

Few days back I saw the Maruti 800 TV commercial where cute punjabi kid rolling his toy car at all the possible places and finally complaining that "Papaji ki kara, petrol khatam hi nahi honda"!! I love this ad. This refreshed some of my childhood memories.

Once we went to our uncle’s house on summer holidays. We were very surprised and happy to see their newly bought TV! We stayed there for 2 weeks. In this time my sister and me were completely addicted to Idiot Box (at least for us it was magic box!). We had already started pestering our mother for getting a TV at our home. Those days we never used to ask our father for anything we wanted, it used to go through our mother. I don’t know it was out of fear to mere respect; we used to behave as very good kids in our father’s presence :). The parenting used to be different in those days as compared to today. Coming back to TV..,,

I was in 6th standard when my father finally brought a TV to our home; I guess it was one of the happiest moments in my life. It was a thrill setting up the antenna on the roof, rotating its directions to get the best signal, and shouting from the roof to check whether the picture is clear!! Once the picture is clear people never used to respond back to you, they think it might go bad again. So they want you to stay there and be ready to rotate it again!!!

Sunday used to be very special! We used to get ready by 7:30 AM to watch Rangoli with Hemamalini. After that my father and me used to go for buying vegetables and meat. By 9 AM my sister and me used to fix our chairs in front of TV. Whether it is Mahabharat, Street hawk, Hum panchi ek dal ke, Phir wahi talash, Mungerilal ke haseen sapne, Wagle ki duniya, Byomkesh bakshi, He-man or regional language movie in the afternoon (language did not matter to us we used to see all!!), Urdu news, news for hearing impaired in the afternoon, job news (I did not know why we used to watch this also ;)), Bharat ek Khoj and never to miss Surabhi. Of course we were trying no to miss the commercials. We used to rhyme along with the commercials!! Some of the commercials we used to like more than the serial itself!! Some of the best ads were
Lifebouy, Fevicol, Clinic plus, Maruti 800, Lizzat papad, Rasna, Cinkara, Ajanta clock, Parle G, Vicco tumeric, Hajmola, Crack-jack etc.

The serials like Byomkesh Bakshi and Tehkikaat were gem of detective serials. I still remember some of the episodes! Dekh bhai dekh was one of my favourite comedy serials. Another one is Flop show. I still remember one episode, where Jaspal bhatti taking his wife for a drive around the city on his official (sarkari) vehicle. Guess what vehicle it was; it was road roller!! Jaspal bhatti was very happy because he is fulfilling his childhood wish of taking his wife for drive one sarkari vehicle! Apart from this there was Charlie chaplin, three stooges and Laurel & Hardy to create the laugh riot!
There was one puppet serial called potli baba ki, with nice short stories. Sci-fi serials like Sigma and Street hawk. I didn’t know that George Clooney was the Man on the Machine!! Duck tales, Mickey Mouse, and Tale spin were the treat for cartoon lovers. Zamana badal gaya hai was a serial which used to show the generation gap related issues in the closely knitted traditional family. Office-office was catering to show the corruption in the Govt offices. Surabhi; we never missed it! We wrote numerous letters to Surabhi with our answers to the questions asked, unluckily not even a single time our letter was not picked through lucky dip! It used to show nook and corner of India and its historical details. Siddharth Kak and Renuka Sahane were the perfect hosts and the background music was superb. I do not find the serials of this quality today. If at all you like some serial you will be bugged up with ads and the recap and the preview of next episode will take enough time to see the real content only for some 10 minutes! Some of the comedy shows are running only on vulgar dialogues! If you use decent lines then your “punches” will not work and you are out of the show! The some of jokes are like old wine in new bottle. Todays one of the biggest hit are the reality shows. If I start talking about them, it will be a big thread in itself. I do not know how much the reality present in these shows, they all look fabricated to me.

Coming to ads, there was not even a single indecent ad. Ads were cute and message was clear. Today you turn on the TV and watch ads; out of three at least one you will get one indecent or mindless ad. I saw one ad regarding future mail using the in.com mailbox. Here the user is setting a mid night time to send a mail to his Boss. But I don’t understand from when companies started using private mail Ids for official purposes! Another ad is by some thermo wear played by Boman Irani. It is just unimaginable and I do not know why an actor of Boman Irani’s calibre signing these (Honey, its all about Money!). I am not bashing all the ads of today; there are some good ones also.

In past there were some good initiatives for national integrity like Mile sur mera tumhara. We never used to miss this; especially when Oriya and Telugu people tell their dialogue in respective languages. We also used to sing along complete song. Lately, I saw this being played at the Bangalore cantonment station.

A lot has been changed. We were very happy with the single available channel and its limited programs. Good old days were golden days where complete family could watch the programs without any hesitation. Today there are at least 100 channels a person can watch; they are categorized like entertainment, news (some of the channels of this category should be moved to entertainment!), sports, life style, music etc. But still nobody is satisfied, most of us keep changing the channels and keep cribbing that there is nothing interesting!! Sometimes we even forget what we were watching 15 minutes ago. Is it the content or the mindset that is making us to change the channels? Anyway it is today’s lifestyle and we get upgraded to it!

There are many old serial videos available on net. Following links will refresh your memories about old popular ads. You will see many stars of today acted as kids in these ads, which just went unnoticed.

http://abhisays.com/india/old-doordarshan-tv-ads-part-1.html

http://abhisays.com/india/old-doordarshan-tv-ads-part-2.html