The Idiot Box and the not-so-idiot memories....

These days the television (TV) has me glued to its alluring screen for all sort of reasons. Sunanda Pushkar’s sudden death, Kejriwal’s dharna, Narendra Modi’s speech, a few all time favourite movies, the oft-repeated episodes of CID, Arnab Goswami’s heated debates – I have lost count of the interesting programmes that entice me to click on the black rectangle at odd hours. The word television is derived from the ancient Greek word tèle meaning "far", and Latin word "visio", meaning "sight". When Philo Farnsworth made the world’s first working television system in 1927, little had he imagined that the idiot box will come to occupy such a supreme position in our lives someday. This four-cornered monster has almost displaced the age-old newspaper as the most important source of news and entertainment.

My first rendezvous with the TV was in 1985, when my father brought a brown carton of substantial size with the name “ONIDA” written boldly in black on it. Unpacking it revealed a wonder that remained an integral part of our lives till its unceremonious demise more than a decade later in the hands of a sly TV mechanic who went by the name “Sunil Deb”.

I remember the first day of its installation. The white mustard seeds on the screen almost disappointed us, but a miracle in the form of the “fish-bone” antennae held up high on the roof-top painted smiles as big as the “Maharaja Mac” burger on our lips. And the fact that it was a coloured TV added more to our happiness. Suddenly life was all about Humlog (Barki, Majhli, Chutki, etc.), Rajni, Khandaan, etc. I remember the voices of Ved Prakash (with spectacles), Minu (read the English news), Sunit Tandon (bearded), Sarla Maheshwari (had a mole on her lower cheek), Salma Sultan (rose on her hair), Rini Simon (smart with short hair), Kaveri Mukherjee (beautiful eyes), Neethi Ravindran (smart), Komal GB Singh (beautiful), etc. sharing the news of the entire world with us during our meal-times. And how can I forget the snail-like white commas which came with the trademark background music to form the infamous logo of “Doordarshan” on the TV screen?

One of my most cherished memories of TV serials is that of the Ramayana. We sat glued to the screen like an obsessed lover clinging to his girlfriend! I remember my mother and the neighbourhood ladies discussing supposed incidents of thefts in many a households while the family members sat attentively watching the Ramayana (though today I have serious reservations about such incidents really occurring). He-man, Street Hawk (Night-Rider), Vikram-Betaal, Stone Boy, Antariksh, Air Hostess, Mahabharata, Rangoli, Chitrahaar – these became unavoidable words of our daily lingo. And yes, the suave Roshan Seth in “Bharat Ek Khoj”, who was initially imposed on me like an unsolicited bridegroom, went on to become a personal favourite in due course of time.

It is the television to which I owe my fascination for sports like cricket and tennis (football comes a distant third), and my undying love for the Palmolive shampoo (endorsed by a well-dressed Kapil Dev smiling maniacally on the TV screen) till the company stopped production of the fascinating blue liquid. And how can I forget the “Rasna” girl? She is responsible for the endless glasses of the orange nectar that I insisted on having each evening till the shopkeeper of the neighbourhood general store shut shop to elope with the teenage daughter of the local barber.

I also owe my cherished affair with Hindi movies to our ONIDA TV (which also had a remote). My earliest memories of Hindi movies go back to sporadic, hazy flashes of watching ‘Tarzan’ and ‘Ram Teri Ganga Maili’ in the small cinema hall of the little town named Goalpara where we lived (and in retrospect, I seriously wonder about the intentions of my parents who exposed me and my younger brother to such ‘matured’ celluloid masterpieces; I was barely seven and I cannot help but salute my ahead-of-the-times parents who were either too courageous or were really ignorant to have exposed me and my four year old brother to the antics of Kimi Katkar-Hemant Birje and the escapades of Rajiv Kapoor-Mandakini!). Jokes apart, I got acquainted with both regional as well as Hindi films, courtesy – television.

After more than twelve years of dedicated service, our ONIDA (neighbour’s envy) became sick. It was afflicted with a strange disease where green became blue and red became green. The bloodied villains of movies looked like moss-covered aliens and the trees were perennially bathed in indigo drizzle. A destroyer who went by the name of Sunil Deb came disguised as a TV mechanic and put the last nail on the coffin of our old friend.

I watch a TV with an LCD (or is it LED?) screen now. The enlightened souls may call it a promotion, but I miss my ONIDA. I miss Usha Albuquerque telling me about the weather forecast of the four metros, I miss a lean Vinod Dua articulating with the familiar twinkle, I miss the enthusiastic voice of Narottam Puri relaying sports news at 4 p.m, I miss the elegant pearl strings which adorned the shapely neck of Gitanjali Aiyer, I also miss the trademark hair-bun of Avinash Kaur Sarin, the booming voice of Tejeshwar Singh, the lovely face of Shobhna Jagdish, the crazy Cadbury girl in the violet frock who danced her way to the cricket field…Yes, I unabashedly admit that I miss a less sophisticated Prannoy Roy, the bespectacled K.K. Raina, the eagerly awaited Sunday evening movies, the heart-touching stories of Hello Zindagi, the cute Master Manjunath of Malgudi, the enthusiasm with which I sat through the entire telecast of the Republic Day parade till the very end, and ironically, I also miss being a part of the untiring wait through the entire duration of a sad-looking “rukawat ke liye khed hain” because there was just one channel and the concept of “channel surfing” was still in its embryonic stage.

Was Arthur Golden thinking the way I do when he said, “Sometimes, I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.”