Why Indian Television Needs a Hum Paanch?

Humour is a complicated vehicle to drive. One needs to maintain fine balance while carrying entertainment or a strong message. The danger of using humour as a catalyst to put forth a thought provoking point is that the whole message might get lost in the garb of comedy.  It usually takes a re-watch (although not a difficult proposition in case of a good comic entertainer) to unravel the layers that the maker had neatly tucked with the wit, which we missed the first time we saw it.

A very interesting recent blog post by a friend (Read here- http://30dayshathseptember.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/a-new-read-or-a-re-read/ ) puts a pertinent point whether our perception of a form of art changes with time and age as we revisit them. Is it the fact that we evolve or is it just that we forgot to dissect it clinically the first time around?

I feel it happens a lot in the case of comic genre. A classic example of this has been doing rounds across the circumference of my brain. I am referring to the cult comic show of the 90’s -Hum Paanch. For the benefit of those who haven’t seen the show, here’s some information on it –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hum_Paanch_(TV_series)

 

I was a kid, who had the luxury of being exposed to cable television very early. I made full use of it and well, spent literally hours watching Television [which explains the absence of the sport bone in my body]. In addition to that, somehow the family was able to resist acting on the social norm of disconnecting cable connection during exams. So the blessing was perennial.

Hum Paanch was one of my favourite shows back then. The sheer novelty of a good sitcom [ after Dekh Bhai Dekh] and the eccentricity of the characters, backed with witty lines and even insane physical comedy of characters banging heads against the wall or the furniture, had me hooked on for a good dose of entertainment.

But now, in retrospect, when I dissect the whole premise of the show and the characters which were established, I have no second thoughts in touting HUM PAANCH as one of the most, if not the most, progressive show Indian Idiot Box has ever pulled out of its collection.

The show narrates the story of a middle class working man with a family of a wife and 5 daughters. His first wife passed away after the couple had 3 daughters. Albeit, the show described how the father is troubled by the pranks of his daughters, it strongly underlined the essence of a family as well. 

All the daughters in the show were high on the expression quotient, be it the eldest daughter’s work for a feminist cause or Sweety’s definition of the only purpose in her life being to marry Shah Rukh Khan. The characters were epitomes of candid expression of what they aspired. Their aspiration was fuelled by the support of their mother. The affection she bestowed on all her daughters was so true that a viewer who would have started following the show sometime in between would totally miss the fact that three of them were her step daughters. Contrast this, with the step mother’s association with nothing less than Satan in most popular culture representation.

What also stood out in the show is each of the daughters had a personality. While we see a deluge of shows these days, very few of them are characters who stand out in terms of a neat character sketch and having a personality trait. Most of them seem like the clone of some other character you might have seen in some other show on some other channel. Hum Paanch ensured that each daughter would be remembered for her individual characteristic traits, distinct and cleanly spaced out.

Coming to the most alluring part of the show which puts this in a bracket for me way above the board compared to others, is the relation Ashok Saraf’s character has with the photo frame of his dead wife [ played brilliantly by Priya Tendulkar]. This beautiful relationship surpasses the myriad romantic or intense dramatic couple stories we have seen. An absolutely simple thought, but it works on so many levels, answering so many complex questions about society and relationships. It shows how it is possible for a man to stay attached to his first wife but not at the expense of his love for his current life partner. At no point does the tone ring of infidelity, it just puts across how he feels blessed to have two wonderful women in his life and he has love to offer for both. This is a very sensitive issue and the show manages to show this fine balance with aplomb.

The show breaks the whole class based barrier where the daughter of the boss is shown to be a stout disciple of one of the daughters. This breaks down all societal conventions of different classes mingling only amongst their own herd and not with each other.

The show portrays a girl who just cannot identify with the mannerisms of a girl and finds herself identifying more with guys. She doesn’t suppress this thought and decides to act on it- she dresses like a boy and doesn’t even mind hanging out with goons.

The show has many nuances which are a source of great learning for the contemporary programming fellows. It’s good to showcase societal reality in storytelling, but it is an equally strong responsibility to pass on subtle messages of how we would like to paint our society to the current as well as the upcoming generation.

We need to micro manage people’s thoughts and break it down to smaller components instead of just parenthesizing them into good or evil. We all need and deserve something better.

Prepare to Retire

 

 

Classical conditioning is a practice which is conditioned in our thought process- sometimes subtly, but mostly with a brazen candour. Training is a chip which is embedded within our veins each time before we start on a new journey. It all starts off with a parent holding your hand to teach you how to walk, how to speak, what to eat, how to eat, how much to eat, what not to eat, where to eat, whom to eat with and all the other related eating activities apart from other not so important things.

Formal education is the apostle to prepare us for the bout of adorning our careers. To prove a clear point that what has been told to you all these years through education is futile and has no application in the real world, you are inducted and trained again for basic skill sets at workplace. A school of thought believes that these training modules are created to kill your swashbuckling instincts and just orient you to align with the processes. So you may garb your actions in the cloak of originality, but you are doing nothing more than just contributing to the processes.

Another school of thought agrees to disagree with this perspective. They claim that we have an innate penchant for comfort zones and these training modules are meant to ensure a smooth transition from your previous comfort zone and in the process build a new one where you have to ultimately reside for some part of the near future. Neat explanation indeed.

But where this training process goes horribly wrong is making us overtly dependent on it, so much that whenever we are looking at a transition facing us in our lives, we are looking at external sources to prepare for it. This is equally applicable in professional and personal lives which explains the booming business of books on interview preparations, self-improvement books and seminars, books on being a good parent, a good husband/wife and of course the perennial business of shrinks. It’s no more the stress months of annual appraisal, kids’ exam months which are high business generating leads for shrinks. They have been able to come up with a strategic business calendar to emphasize on stress points for each month of the year. After all, stress is round the corner, all you need to do is seek for it.

So after living a life of being conditioned for change, when an individual looks forward to the change of retirement, inevitably he/she ends up leaving a few loose ends in preparing for it. Some claim to have worked on the plan for years, others reassure themselves that they are mentally convinced and have a fall-back arrangement to battle the change. Some claim to have found an escape route to procrastinate answering the question, but the stark reality is they are just not prepared for it.

’40 tak note chaapo aur fir retirement’ is a line used in one of the recent movies which resonates the mantra of a modern day professional. The line of thought is clear: earn as much as possible till a certain age and then dedicate your life reaping the dividends of your hard work and spending time to nurture refined taste in your hobby. The sad part is this plan is no better than Government’s Five Year Plans. You know the problem, you have a plan to confront the macro challenges, but there is no attention paid to detailing. The variable of your personality changing is completely neglected.

The practical problems start off with shifting base to a new city, which in most cases is the native state where you belong. After absorbing the flavour of the culture of a specific region of this country, settling down in some other part is a daunting task. We proud ourselves in Unity in Diversity, but when the fundamental brick refuses to align itself, be rest assure the mansion is not going to be a sturdy one. The differences arise from ease of borrowing sugar to borrowing domestic help, from aligning evening walks to aligning frequency of thoughts, from inviting neighbours for tea to not inviting unnecessary attention of the ones not invited for tea in the first batch. The count is endless.

Men probably find it more difficult to adjust to this change as now their boisterous flamboyance is compromised. They usually are not as well connected to the realities of their own nest and always had a cave to run off to in the form of the outer world. Working women, because of the weight of expectations from the beginning, master the art of balancing both worlds. A small example can be the discomfort men face when left to manage the domestic help in the absence of the lady of the house. So you would find a man whose line in the CV boasted in block letters: Exquisite leadership skills with expertise in resource and people management, but now clearly struggling to brief the maid properly to cover each corner of the house while wiping the floor.

Neither will they be too vocal about the discomfort, nor will they immediately find an acknowledgement to accept this reality. Their response to this change would be to find some avenue to keep themselves busy by finding a task. Thus, you would find the car being cleaned, switchboards being examined, ration being ordered and delivered, plumber being beckoned, bank visits, municipality office visits, electricity office visits, society secretary office visits, propensity for tea/coffee all increase in frequency. After all a person who had henchmen throughout his life ready to follow orders just at the stroke of a finger, now find themselves to be all alone like a king dethroned and sent on an exile.

It is all a matter of acknowledging and appreciating the change within you. We are forced to recognize how our body changes with time and becomes susceptible to external forces. Somehow we refuse to acknowledge and notice the same when it comes to our mind. Losing span of control at work doesn’t mean you have to build one at home. The idea should be to let your mind go on a vacation to a destination which it has loved forever. It is important to figure out what makes you happy early in your life, so that if time was an excuse for not visiting that junction during working days, maybe now you can let your mind pack its bags from the routine and take off to the happy zone. You have spent enough years of your life becoming an example for others, maybe a few can be dedicated to create one for yourself.