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Slow and Steady Don't Always Win

P.S. I discovered this amazing blog, www.delatheinker.wordpress.com, and I think you should see it. Especially if I’ve annoyed you before. And even if I haven’t, I assure you I will soon, so go and see it.

Now to what the crazy fairy left in my room again.

*

Dear Indian Television Series,


Namaste!

I see you a lot nowadays. Sometimes because I want to, because in my rankings—and everyone knows that counts for something—British humour comes first, then Indian, then…the rest. Sometimes against my will, because…I’m passing by the television set and you’re just…there! A lot. On so many channels. You’re almost…inevitable now.

But that’s not the problem.

Although it could count as one, because I consider how ubiquitous you are on local TV and I wonder if any of our series are on your TV channels in India. Do Ravi and Seeta cut conversations short and run home because they don’t want to miss a second of Bongo Bar? But who cares?

I do.

Whatever it be, there are some things you need to answer.

Because unlike Leonard suggests I cannot stick a coat hanger into my ear to scratch the itch in my brain.

Why are you so slow? Why do you move so slowly? Why is your pace so glacial? Why do things never happen fast with you? Why must one encounter spread over a couple hundred episodes? Why is it, that in the period between Shalu making an important revelation and Prem delivering a reply, I can cycle to the Panama Canal, measure the distance between Tuscany and Rio with help from only two of those cute fifteen centimetre rulers that always used to get missing when we so badly needed them for Pre-Tech, get Drake to marry Madonna, and see Wenger lift the World Cup?

(I just had to bring up Wenger, didn’t I?)

And the reactions! Why do we have to see everybody’s reaction, one by one, like the story cannot progress without me viewing Malhotra’s (and Raj’s, and Maya’s, and Opash’s, and Suriya’s) jaws drop because Shanti (is Shanti an Indian name? It is? Okay) said she’d rather go to Sanford than Mumbai University?

See what I did there, said pretty much the same thing in about a thousand sentences? Has the message hit you yet? How you say the same thing in a thousand sentences? Word! It’s absurd. You can go on, and on, and on, and on, and on, (so much that right now I’m going on with you. Let me add one ‘and on’ and be done with it) and on (done!) about the same thing, when the point has been made already. You do realize that people speak in words, right, with occasional full sentence and the rare paragraph. But the characters that walk about in you, they go on for chapters. I could try to teach martial arts to under-six-year-olds and succeed sooner than Usha finishes telling Sameer her piece of mind.

Your names are so nice though. Or maybe it’s your clothes. Mm.

And why is it so hard for you guys to end? Goodness. I don’t think I’ve ever watched any of you to the end (but then…it’s not much of my thing to follow series. Still counts as a valid point). I Googled one of you and it went over six hundred episodes. Six. Hundred. Episodes. Why? Why will you chain someone in a roller-coaster for six hundred hours, and if it was a comic roller-coaster that would not be as lethal, but it’s a romantic/suspense/glacial/you could quicker watch a horse morph into an elephant roller-coaster? Why do you continue to introduce plot twist, after plot twist, after new story, within same old story, when we see that the series has reached its end and it won’t be such a bad thing to let viewers go so they can catch up with reality and make some money so plantain won’t be as expensive as it is now?

(Because the price of plantain is a big deal now.)

Please, with all the humility I could muster from all the other fairies around (because this fairy has no humility to offer you herself), I ask you to reply. Fast. I don’t want to have to wait for Neptune to be proven a habitable planet before you send the reply. Because if you do that, you’ll address it to this place. Earth. And I won’t be here. Oh, no. I’ll be in another place. Another orbit. Playing holographic chess with the prince of Neptune. Who’ll be my son. Because…put two and two together.

Okay. I’m done.

Do I say ‘namaste’ now too?

Signed,



The Toot Shaheena Chopra
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