Moms and Mega serials

My 55 year old mother watches 3 mega-serials every day in TV and feels very uncomfortable if she misses a single episode of any of those three. Apart from watching, frequent discussions on these mega serials happen with neighborhood aunties. I am sure people who are reading this blog would also feel either their mom or wife or aunties are also addicted to this ‘Megaserialobia’. According to me this Megaserialobia is cultivating huge amount of ‘Negative’ and ‘Depressive’ thoughts among people.

The pattern and the objective of these mega-serials are very simple: Tap people’s emotions and make a huge business out of it. The mega-serial work starts with hiring 35+ year old cine actresses who lost almost all her opportunities acting in cinemas and make a ‘Heroine’ centric story around her. Then this 35+ year old ‘So-Called-Heroine’ gets married and moves into her in-law’s place. There she faces all sorts of problems ranging from humiliation to criminal case thanks to her ‘In-laws-and-co’ and some more ‘External villans’. This story moves on and on for years and shows how this ‘So-called-heroine’ fights against all her odds and finally wins her ‘War’ called ‘Life’. Even though some of the problems the ‘So-called-Heroine’ faces is true in real time, most of the other problems are well packaged to ‘emotionally blackmail’ people. This serial lasts for about 500 episodes in which about 450 episodes are focused on the ‘Negative’ and ‘Depressive’ areas of life and the remaining 50 is attributed to the end of this serial. To put in simple term the whole serial focuses on the ‘Negative’ aspects of life.

Nowadays these serials are becoming big hit by tapping the negative emotions of people which according to me not a healthy sign at all. On the other end people who make these mega serials make huge money out of this venture. To give simple statistics, a 10 second ad during these mega serials costs up to to 35,000 INR. Assuming seven minutes advertisement time per episode the producer makes about 75 crores by the end of one mega serial which is really a huge number by any standard. I am not concerned about producers making money (After all they are here for doing business) but they make it by showing negative things like humiliation, joint-family problems, deceiving and molestation.

Apart from mega serials I have also observed most of our TV channels show ‘Negative’ things happening around us rather than ‘Positive’. If we can have series of polls and debates on recent Mumbai bomb blasts why there not much TV programs on India’s booming economy, Raising middle class, Budding Entrepreneurs or even for that matter more comedy programs? I remembered one of the excellent speeches given by our President Dr. APJ Abdul Kalaam’s and an excerpt from the speech is given below:

I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had the picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed his desert land into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news. In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime. Why are we so NEGATIVE?

To conclude I also do have the same question Dr.Kalaam has: WHY ARE WE SO NEGATIVE?