Why our Television Shows Tend To Go On and On for Like Years...

A lot has been written about this before and has been well stated but as I started following this new channel called "Zindagi" from Pakistan (Rarely a daily soap catches my interest) my entire views about daily soaps changed. The maturity and content shown on that channel is unmatched. They are taking up almost every social issue and making the most meaningful shows out of it almost changing the definition of daily soaps.

Frankly speaking I blame daily soaps for everything bad in my life. Yes I am accusing them! Because I grew up seeing my grandparents watch them, endless mother in law and daughter in law drama which led me to thinking that in every home there are people who keep planning and plotting. As I grew up in every daily soap either the main protagonist was attracted to a very talkative, flamboyant girl or the quietest girl in the entire series (No hope for normal girls). And yes then those shows about college life. I was moved to tears when I entered college, unlike what they showed that everyone dances, eats in the canteen, talks, my college had uniform and we literally had to study from 9am to 4pm. Another heartbreaking reality check for me.

Well coming back to what I started with why our daily soaps get a chance to celebrate 500 episodes or for that instance 1000 episodes.

1. Because the main protagonist marries two or three times at least, their sisters and brothers get married, their first and second husband and wives get married, their enemies who get a surgery get married at least twice and so and so. For every marriage scene they have at least 5 episodes named "Mega episode" where actors from other daily soaps come and dance. There is a "Mehndi Night", "Engagement", "Wedding night" and sadly the entire focus is never marriage, it is some totally other person who has secretly plotted to ruin it. So ultimately a marriage which is so often in our daily soaps is a thriller. So by calculations around 10 people minimum and on an average 3 marriages with each marriage for 5 days sums to 150 episodes.

2. Every intense scene has to be focused by each and every camera that is placed as if they are deliberately trying to bring to your notice that see we have these many cameras. So a scene which should have been shown once ultimately gets shown 3 to 5 times from different angles and shades of color ranging from black and white to extreme contrast.

3. Every impactful dialogue has to be repeated thrice with close-ups of everyone's face so that you capture their emotions even when 90 percent of the actors have their faces emotionless and for actresses it gets hidden behind makeup. We are not dumb; we understand the dialogues at once. No need to repeat them with blaring sound effects.

4. Our directors have a very furistic approach. They do not want their audience to think what could have happened. So they take the pain to take leaps of 5 years, 10 years to show that the younger generation did nothing but replicate the actions of their ancestors. Our industry knows how widespread unemployment is, so they give opportunity to 100s of actors in one soap. Very considerate.

5. How can you forget the random song sequences? Where the hero and heroine would look at each other and you will have to listen to a complete song whether it suits the scenario or not. I vividly remember "Bade Ache Lagte Hain" showing "Teri shirt ka main button soniye" song even when the heroine always donned a saree. WTH!!!!!

Apart from all these things you have special festival episodes, guest appearances, divorce scenes all full with songs and melodrama. If you remove these things from our daily soaps they will hardly be over in like a month or so...

Trust me some of them can make up to the funniest videos of youtube as well.

I wish not to offend anyone who views them or works in them . I understand you put a lot of hard work in them and also your mind , body , soul sometimes literally and down the line if the TRP is going good why would you stop. But then asking for some meaningful shows. NAh am I asking much???

You decide!!

Every Girl Should Know How to Make GOOD TEA

As a part of growing up the biggest challenge I faced was making tea. I mean every mother ushers her daughter forcing her to make tea at some point or the other. In simpler words making tea is the first step to knowing how to start cooking. Obviously you are a girl you need to know how to cook.

Coming back to tea which is a very essential drink in every household, some start their day with it, some at the evening, some a few times in a day and some every hour. Tea is nothing but a concoction of water, milk, sugar (sugarless for those who are dieting) and tea leaves boiled continuously for around five to ten minutes and then strained and put into beautiful cups. But that is where the beauty lies. Even with such few ingredients and some added ones like ginger, cinnamon and other masalas, every cup of tea tastes different.

As if every other person puts a little magic into their tea. It surprises me how each one of us can make tea and using the same set of things and even then it will have different tastes. Maybe its about temperature or the order in which you put the things. I don’t know.

Tea is most of the times the first thing every person makes. For girls it is also the only thing that she serves her soon to be groom with. So they judge her with the kind of tea she makes.

Tea marks the beginning of our day and also its end. It is everywhere, on the desk of a working lady, on the bedside of an old woman, in the hands of a doctor who just finished her night duty, in the thermos flask of the patients family and even in your kitchen.

I still do not know how to make a perfect cup of tea though I can make any delicacy.

Maybe I am not perfect at all....

Going and getting my own tea...

The Changing Tastes Of Indian Households with Inflation

Living in India teaches you a lot of budgeting. Trust me  Indians are very calculative when it comes to their regular lives. So am I. Well but then a hell lot of fun happens when the budgeting hits the kitchen.

Last year one fine evening my mother who used to give me these long lectures about some vitamin in tomatoes suddenly started blaming this very vegetable( or fruit as you prefer) for her acidity. Well the reason was that rate of tomatoes increased from 30 per kg to 10o bucks per kg. I mean 100?

I was very amused with all the jokes on twitter and facebook  about the 100per Kg thing. But that is not my point. With that changed the statistics of my kitchen. Tomatoes were forbidden. My yummy tomato sandwitches changed to potato sandwitches, the daily salad disappeared from the dining table, our very own Mc Donalds deprived us of that single slice of tomato they placed between the Mc Aloo Tikki  and my mother to top it all started using ketchup instead of tomato puree reasoning me that they are more or less the same. She even found substitutes like raw mangoes, dried mango powder and even lemon juice as if none of them were remotely acidic. I cursed the vegetable sellers who mocked us for buying just 250 gm of tomatoes that is around three tomatoes in a week.  Obviously he felt rich because he could afford a cart of tomatoes .

After a good long wait of 4 months , I got the taste of tomato soup and I felt like a King.

Next my kitchen was hard hit when suddenly onion prices went high. Yes you guessed it right my mother insisted that we being Brahmins should quit eating onions and stick to a pure vegetarian diet. This time my dad joined her league. He was one who’d never eat his meals without raw onion salad and then he started giving lectures on how disgusting a smell raw onions leaves. My favourite “Paneer sabji” looked like balls of white swimming in spicy water without onions and tomatoes.

And restaurants, well they had a totally new ideology. Every dish that had he word “PYAZA” or “Tamatari” had its prices doubled and the amount of tomato and onions halved. We as customers felt cheated. On asking for marinated onions all we got were 3 small shallots that too half eaten by God knows whom.

This was really a testing time for all middle class families like mine. We went on a never ending fast. Barring the rich who were least concerned as the vegetables that they eat are usually very highly priced like  broccoli, asparagus , blabla.

Trust me you might find this funny but being an ultimate foodie it was the biggest torture I ever had.

Signing off now...

My Teachers

Teachers as they say are the greatest gift to humanity. Somewhere I feel they are even above doctors as well. Not to offend anyone but I personally feel it might have been the motivation of a teacher and his guidance that modeled the career of a child into that of a doctor. The best part of being a teacher is that you can never estimate the amount of lives you have impacted and changed. Some directly , some indirectly and some almost just by existing.

Talking of my journey as a student, each and every teacher who has ever taught me has had a sweet spot in my life but two of them have left indelible marks on my overall personalities. The sculptors of my life  Mrs. Vineeta Misra and Mr. Puneet Chandra,  the former being my English teacher from school and the latter being my teacher from coaching.

Mrs. Misra was the most strict teacher in our school, a disciplinarian but she was the most warm hearted teacher the school would ever have.  She believed that one must read to travel beyond the confinements of our society. She registered her pleasures and displeasures with equal assertion over everything. Her courage defied the fragile framework she had. For me she was more like a doting mother who’d motivate me no matter how many times I failed and even covered up for  my bad marks at times of the most dreaded Parents teachers meetings. I remember her always telling me that this world is full of politics everywhere except real politics and one has to be very careful while treading the path of truthfulness. In dire circumstances I never saw her moulding her words. She never was embarrassed if she failed to know something which rarely happened  but on the contrary she would go forward and learn from  students. For her even an infant was a capable teacher because more than 90 percent of things we learn is never from the books..The admiration I had for her changed into respect  seeing every effort she made for studies to become pleasure than burden. She never knew but I was always absorbing all her qualities and today when I face the world I realize that  the courage and the boldness that reflects in my writeups are the essence of her personality. Needless to say she made me fall in love with her subject and I after all struggles that include 4 years of engineering I ended up being a journalist. And I carry forward her words and teachings in everything I write.

Mr. Chandra , a self made man, very raw in his demeanour was one teacher that I pray every students should get once in their lifetime. Though he taught Physics , the class I never was interested in but seeing him teach was in itself so captivating that I could never afford to miss even a single lecture. The zeal with which he taught displayed the sense of  responsibility he had towards his profession. He literally put so much effort as if he wanted all his knowledge to disseminate in our brains. In a class of more than a hundred students he knew exactly what each student was doing, such was his concern. He taught with the flair of a painter painting his masterpiece. Scientifically speaking The energy he created in class was never destroyed and it was transferred from one student to another. Even on days when he was terribly ill, you would not find him resting or taking a leave. I vividly remember asking him once so as to why doesn’t he take a leave. His reply left me smiling and contended at heart. “Your parents pay me with their hard earned money and when I sleep at night I am convinced that I am being true to the work God has assigned me.” He was very optimistic and also an ardent believer of Maa Durga. Ever you praise him and his reply would be “Its because of Mataraani”. The best part about him was that he was a perfect role model for each of us.  I was sad when my IIT result came not because I ever expected anything but I really wanted him to know how much he impacted myself.  Its because of him that I never gave up. I thought it would be sheer disrespect of his exceptional methodology of teaching if I am unable to get good marks in his subject. I secured a decent 80 in Physics exam which was an achievement for me.  He taught us physics of life everyday and I learnt those lessons by heart.

The flawed concept of Manning Up

I had a cousin who was younger to me but a very talented guy. He used to love cooking and writing poetry but then a single phrase changed his entire outlook towards life.

“Man up buddy”

All his friends used to tease him for his hobbies which were turning into his passion. They called him names like “the housewife”, “girlie lad” and what not. Leave aside his friends my own relatives asked him to steer away from hobbies that are considered feminine. He reasoned them, showed them cookery shows where all these young handsome males cooked delicacies. He wanted to be one of them. But alas our society expects men to behave like men!!

Men don’t cry.

Men don’t feel pain.

Men don’t cook .

Men are always in control.

Why? I guess they have been bestowed with equal tear glands as females. Their nervous system has equal sensory nerves. And probably they have the right to choose what they want to do. I mean why do men have to behave in a particular manner to be called as men!! What would I do if I told you wear only dresses, or skirts or else you are not a female, don’t speak loudly lest  you should be called a tomboy or a manly girl. Such irrelevant prejudices have led to a basic definition and  a certain mannerism in which boys and girls have to behave in order to be a part of the gender they belong to.

Still whenever we see a man cry instead of letting them be, we’ll go and give them a short lecture on how to man up. Why? Men feel hurt equally and they have every right to show it and feel it. They have tear glands that work as well.  They also have heartbreaks and heartaches that make them vulnerable. It is okay for them to shed a few tears. But no according to the society men don’t cry. So they suppress their feelings. Maybe due to bottling up of emotions leads to more heart attacks in males than females.

If I prick you with a pin on your finger, a drop of blood will ooze out irrespective of the fact that you are a male or female. Am I right? So that means we can feel equally? Then why is that men cannot register their pain?

This entire concept is so flawed that it has given rise to robots in form of men who work , smile , laugh and do everything as programmed. Being a girl if I am told not to do certain things because that is not how girls are expected to behave then I might simply ask where is it written?

For all those men out there

There are no issues if you cry, or tears well up in your eyes when you are watching an emotional movie. You can shout a loud ouch if someone steps on your shoes and you can say awwww if you find something cute. There is no concept called manning up.

It is Be Human guys !!!!

Make compromises because YOU ARE A GIRL!!!

It was dinner time. Having not eaten my lunch I felt very hungry and to my utter dismay my mother had cooked “lauki” or what we call “bottle gourd”. It is not new for any teenager to scrunch their nose on hearing this name. No one wants to eat it and almost instantly I lost my appetite. But then I saw hidden below the plate was a bowl that had one of my favourite vegetable. Fried potatoes!! And my hunger returned with all the rats changing to dinosaurs in my stomach. I grabbed my plate and served my food when I heard my mother telling me that, that the fried potatoes I was eyeing were not made for me. They were for my brother. My dislike for lauki shouldn’t have been a surprise for my mother as I have never eaten it and almost when I did it was because I was forced to. What shocked me more was even after knowing this fact very well she cooked potatoes for my brother yet she did not give a thought about me. People would say such a petty thing it is. Whats the big deal about this.

It was a big deal. These small little things are the one that pass with such a silence that their occurrence never hit us. I felt insignificant infront of my much younger brother. I questioned her simply and her reply left me stunned “He cannot eat that.”

“So cant I.”

“You are elder you can.”

“But as a child you always taught me and lectured me on my eating habits.”

“You have to go to another home. He doesn't.”

“Where does this come from? When I get married I will have a right to choose what I want to cook and eat. And this has probably nothing to do with me getting married. When you cooked this vegetable you could have easily increased its amount which you deliberately chose not to.”

“Stop arguing and eat your food. You have lost all sense of respect towards your elders.”

I still can’t fathom where was I disrespectful. All I demanded were equal privileges for me and my brother. If he couldn't eat something why was I forced to eat it. Does my mother not want a healthy life for my brother. Or did she just gave into his demands because she found it difficult to refuse him?

Either ways I felt I did not belong to that place. I am not married right now and still I can’t claim my own house to be mine. After marriage my husband would claim the house I live in as his. Will I never have a home that I can call mine? How easy it is for parents to say you will have to leave this home not even knowing that their words can pierce the mind of a young soul that resides in the body of a growing female. When my own family does not accept me as a part of them how will someone else’s family is supposed to do that?

It is sad that being a girl I have to find my identity in some other male, be it my father, my husband or my son. All my possessions are a subject to their reference. I find it amusing my mother never felt a need for an identity. She is happy being someone’s wife or mother. But I am not. I crave for more. I want to be known with my name and work. I want a house of my own. I want a body that belongs to me and only me. I can’t shackle my soul nor can I live like that. Am I asking for too much?

Yes I am LOUD

“Yes Yes I am coming”, my father yelled into the mobile.

Sometimes I wonder why does he have to speak so loudly into the phone. With the kind of pitch he has his voice will reach the receiver directly without the mobile as well but then yeah that is how he speaks.

 High pitched voice is what I have inherited from my family. We all are a very loud species. However hard I try to tame my pitch in order to sound soft and mellow, my voice will defy!! So many times I have been told by my friends to speak in a low tone. I let out secrets just because even when I am whispering I am loud enough for people in 500 meter circle to hear me. I suck at Chinese Whisper and that is the reason why my friends avoid this game. Even they realize that its basically not what I do voluntarily it just happens. Everyone in my family is known for their high pitched voice. Even I was known as “The Loudspeaker” in my school days. We can be heard from a distance wherever we are so in short we are never lost. Well during holi my mother recognizes us in a bunch of colored kids just through our voice. So it is a blessing in disguise.  Personally I became o tomboy half because of my voice because however coy I tried to behave I was always too loud and shrill for boys around. My voice intimidated them. Well sadly I always wanted to sing but then I thank God for saving the ear drums of several thousand people.

But then I came in the world of debating and public speaking and almost instantly my voice that I loathed became my shield. My well noted researched points with my loud booming voice created a persona of a very strong personality which made the other debaters very shake. There were times when others would meekly ask for a mike and there I was in all my glory speaking without a mike infront of a crowd of a thousand people listening to me with rapt attention.

I realized sometimes we all are bestowed with a quality that we hate and want to erase from our personality but then very soon we realize that is what makes us different from the masses. Yes I am loud and clear!!!! I will catch your attention even when you don’t want to give me any!!!