Doordarshan may be in the news for the wrong reasons, which it quite often is — this time for tweeting a picture from the BJP parliamentary board meeting and captioning it as “a man dressed as Santa Claus feeding monkeys ahead of Christmas” — but my mind goes back to the time when Doordarshan was our sole window to the world.
I am talking of the 1980s, when some of the finest directors made serials for Doordarshan; when some of the finest actors we have today (Paresh Rawal is a good example) made their debut, on television; when newsreaders were stars in their own right; when Thursday evenings were incomplete without watching Chitrahaar ; when Sundays evenings saw the entire family, at times entire families, gathered around a lone TV set.
For many years we had to give the best seats to neighbours who did not have TV and who insisted on watching the Sunday movie at our place — saying no was simply not an option those days. Then we had a neighbour who owned a TV set but no fridge: very often, a couple of hours before the Sunday movie began, they would bring a vessel-full of sweetened milk and place it in the freezer of our fridge. They would come to claim it during the interval, by when the milk would have turned into ‘ice-cream’. They would gleefully carry away the frozen kheer without even offering us a portion.
Doordarshan, at a time when discotheques and nightclubs were few and far between and confined mainly to the big metros, lent a party-like atmosphere to middle-class homes during Christmas and New Year. During Christmas, Chitrahaar would be devoted to film songs ‘Christian’ in nature — mostly foot-tapping numbers set in a Christian wedding.
And then came New Year’s Eve, when Doordarshan invariably had an impressive line-up of programmes to keep us awake beyond midnight — a rarity in those days. I distinctly remember the evening of the last day of 1982, when viewers were treated to an electrifying performance by the band Osibisa. One song — ‘Ojah awake’ — remained stuck in my mind until I got to download it a couple of decades later.
Then came a time when New Year’s Eve meant sitting with friends around a bottle of Old Monk, discussing dreams and disappointments, followed by a time when the final hours of December 31 had to be spent on the dance floor, come what may, often waking up the next morning not knowing how one got home. I pitied people who did not party.
Today, at 44, having been there and done that, I once again want to ring in the New Year in the company of Doordarshan. Only that I do not know how to get to the channel: I am sure some key on the remote would take me there.