Growing up in a generation where entertainment programming in India was restricted to Doordarshan seems almost unreal for most right now. Souls born in and around the 80's pretty much grew up not having to figure out how the remote works coz there was only one channel to watch!!

But watching Tv was more than just a random pastime.. it seemed to fit mystically in between the daily routine.. creating its own space and memories and leaving a mark on how i'll see and feel about television all my life..

I am part of the "Wake up - get ready - go to school - come back - eat lunch - watch TV - Go to play - come back - study - watch TV - Have dinner (also watching TV) - watch some more TV - go to bed (while parents were probably watching TV) - wake up" generation.. that was pretty much the weekday routine.. the weekends were magical and exciting in their own ways but more on that later..

I guess we weren't the kind of family that doesn't eat in front of the telly.. my parents tried to enforce it many times.. but then they figured eating slowly while watching TV was better for the children that wolfing down a meal at the speed of light and choking to death on a spinach leaf! Also, it didn't help that Dad lived in front of the TV during cricket tournaments.. and i guess i also blame the TV for dampening my love for cricket.. i guess i was horribly scarred by missing all those cartoons in the world cup days and refused to have anything to do with the game as i grew up. Of course now i can couche it in varied socio-political reasons and blame the game for socialist consumerism in which only the elite participate.. but well, at the bottom of everything I'm just child who wants to watch cartoons!

Looking back i find that the memories of childhood are all jumbled up in my head. All the shows i watched as a child are not arranged in a set chronology but form a jumbled hazy picture of what all i remember from the telly.

Television started with the famous Hum Log and another show i can;t remember coz i never got to see them! Hell i was jst born!! Wasn't that much of a television kid! But by the time i actually started i remember gobbling everything up with relish..

Television was a major event and you watched everything.. even, at times, krishi darshan coz it was followed by evening shows that we never wantted to miss. I guess i can attribute all my early general knowledge and minute interest in science and maths to the scanty quiz programming of the time.. I even remember the broadcat of feeds from the gumshuda talaash kendra! I spent so many evenings watching unknown faces like that of raju, jinka kad chaar foot 3 inch, aankhein bhoori, rang sanvala aur chehera gol hai.. i always secretly wished i'd recognise someone from the pictures somewhere just so i'd get to dial teen do saat cheh teen shunya shunya and report to the gumshuda talash kendra at nayee kotwali, dariyaganj, nayi dilli.

Nationalism was big on the charts those days and we grew up listening to mile sur mera tumhaara and baje sargam .. don;t know how but we'd remember the multi lingual lyrics to mile sur mera tumhaara and sing alon at the top of our voices.. no matter how many times we saw it, we never got bored.. i guess that was the idea behind making the video! There was of course the Ek Chidiya anek chidiya cartoon that was and remains still a favourite. Had the pleasure of watching it on youtube some time back and downloading it!! I love that song.. never got tired of the video with that stupid child who wanted to eat mangoes! Television has never been better! Bela gulaab juhi champa chameli..i can still sing the whole song and everyone in my office thinks i'm mad! The afternoons were devoted to fun cartoons like gaayab aaya and chutti chutti.. i still remember Raja raja haddi raja from the puppet shows.

Somewhere along the way..i guess i was in class 7 or 8 by then...shanti started on DD and became the official lunchtime show. This would be followed by some other random shows and something called swabhimaan in the late afternoons.. and yes yes i confess...i was hooked onto daily soaps as a child!! The tribulations of rishabh bajaj and swetlana never seemed to become less interesting..although i don't remember how that show ended! But thatsthe only thing ever that i remember kittu gidwani for..

The evenings were spent waiting for chitrahaar... and dancing along with movie songs.. followed of course by the evening shows that i don't. The weekends of course brought Ramayan and later Mahabharat which i as the rest of the country lapped up with great interest! I still remember the title songs for the shows! Although personally i prefer the loud and booming song from mahabharat followed of course by the words.."main, samay hoon"

By the time i got a little older we had more choices with byomkesh bakshi, some other night time soaps and some random kids programming on the selection list.. that was also around the time when the disney's hour started on sunday mornings.. and once again we were enthralled.. tale spin and ducktales were sunday morning rituals nothing ever could interrupt.. this time even by otherwise cricke crazy brother was hooked and in case of matches, we anxiously switched from one channel to the other so we wouldn't lose out on watching either! This was about the time when hcadrakanta took over sunday mornings and superhit muqabala replaced chitrahaar on DD metro. the Mero revolution also brought with it delh bhai dekh, zabaan ambhalke and for a brief while a new channel DD3 which offere a host of british comedies and the DD's comedy show which is the funniest slapstick comedy i've seen in my life!

That was also the time around which my parents decided to get a dish antenna.. yea we woke up late to the glory of the local cable guys.. so we had a dish that had a separete reciever box which had a regulator to match your televisin to different freequencies like a radio!

The new world of international programming opened up and brought with it a delightful array of choices.. we had the wonderful star TV whic used to be an englih channel at the time.. evenings then became devoted to watching "The lost planet" characterised by these small promis where a bunch of irritating kids would walk around the screen and scream, "you'r watching the lost planet". But we happily sat through e silly promo looking forward to the joys of lassie, the black stallion, the simpsons, the small wonder, boy meets world and wonder years.. the old time classics thatstill remain my favourites.. the dish only gave us a small selection so apart from star plus, star movies and star sports, there wasn;t much else to see.. this made us feel specially glad about the holidays coz we'd go and spend time at out cousin's houses. Not that we weren't happy to see our cousin's and uncles and aunts, but well.. here's the truth.. they had cable TV! So we got unlimited access to the cartoon network, sony with its host of i dream of genie and bewitched, who's the boss, the silverspoons and many more such shows..

I guess with time, doordarshan dwindled away and faded from memory.. but so did the excitement around television.. i guess the laws of deman and supply worked... with more and more things to wath, we just gave up the lot and decided we'd rather not deal with so many television choices when we could go out and play or be with friends instead..

Today's children have many more choices on the telly..they have movies, they have playstation and they have sports practice and tuition classes and music classes and what not to occupy their minds and time.. Programming has evolved and become more complicated as children are beginning to grasp more and more complicated stuff at younger ages. Kids from a background like mine now only talk in english, watch cartoons in movie halls and are perhaps much smarter than i am .. or will be at any age!! I guess times change adn people change with them.. what i miss however is the sound of ek chidiya anek chidiya emanating from windows.. after finding it online, a friend of mine played it to some kids in a small locality near college at a cybercafe.. she was as thrilled as the children were and was overjoyed that children even today loved it. I can;t even think of showing it to some little brats i know coz they'd just embarass me and consider themselves too smart for such backward animation..

I don't care... i still want to scream on the top of my voice and sing mile sur mera tumhaara and sing the title song of bharat ek khoj.. i want to watch gaayab aaya and haddi raja and sing chutti chutti ho gayee chutii.. i guess i've left a part of me back in the doordarshan days and i want to go meet it now! so whenever someone asks me, anek chidiya ki kahani sunoge... i nod and think of plucking mangoes and singing "phool hain anek kintu mala phir ek hai!"





The wise didi from Ek Anek aur Ekta!

Tags: doordarshan, 80's, television, tv