Watch me as I grow

wonder screen

It will come as a surprise to modern readers that the English word ‘Drawing Room’ is actually a shortening of ‘Withdrawing Room’.

This used to be the room, in the western world, where the family and guests would withdraw to, after dinner, the primary get-together of the day. The (with)drawing room was the place where the family exchanged idle chit-chat, sang songs, maybe played music, or just relaxed before going to bed. In India, in the past century, there was no real equivalent traditionally — the well-off mimicked the British drawing room schedule, the rest went to sleep early. The mindset of the person entering the drawing room was of someone disconnecting from the world — ready to go to sleep.

All of this should go to show how much television has changed our world. Starting from the 1950s in the US, and finally taking root in the 80s in India, television has turned the drawing room into our closest connect with the world at large. Radio had its day for a few decades, but it never had the compulsive pull of the television screen. The medium of television has brought people together, made them fight or compromise, made them create their own new groups. Most importantly, television has been the quickest way for a new idea or event to propagate across the world.

India has its own history of television. Doordarshan had been around since the 60s, but mass adoption of TV was triggered around the 1982 Asian Games in Delhi. The government, in an effort to encourage the new technology of colour television, introduced a permit for the production and import of these sets. Over one lakh TVs were imported in that one year. However, television was a single channel, with transmission starting only in the evenings and ending in the night. Every child knew the Doordarshan opening tune by heart.

Television was still not a reason for people to be glued to their seats in living rooms. The rare event, however, could draw them in. As a child of the 80s, the first two major television events I remember are India’s win of the cricket World Cup, and Indira Gandhi’s funeral. One was a cause for celebration, while the other one was a sad event. A few years earlier, when the Emergency had been declared, with all the accompanying fallout, the newspapers and radio had been the only means of news dissemination, and neither of these had the impact of television. But the World Cup victory, now... that moment when Kapil Dev ran, ran and ran to take that impossible catch. We all saw it. We Indians were all there, together. The next year, when the funeral pyre was burning on our screens, we all worried, together. We were now bound by a common thread.

We’ve gotta have it

Through the 80s, and even the beginning of the 90s, television became a must-have for Indians. A colour TV became something aspirational. Never mind that Doordarshan was all we saw. Villagers saw the same programmes that big-city folks did. Certain television programmes became regular entries in people’s appointment diaries. The Wednesday evening Chitrahaar, the Sunday morning Ramayan and Mahabharat series, were the talk of the town. A new TV ad would be endlessly talked over. The patriotic and inspirational fillers produced by the government — Mile Sur Mera Tumhara, Ek Aur Anek Chidiya, even the family planning messages — were part of the common culture. Buniyaad and Hum Log, the prototypical soap operas, were discussed during kitty parties.

But this unified age of Doordarshan was short-lived. By the mid-90s, cable TV came in and revolutionised the TV-watching experience. Now, we could watch something different from what our neighbours were watching. There were a bare dozen channels in the 90s, fed to your home with a cable pulled over rooftops by your neighbourhood cablewala. The cablewala himself would run a video channel where he played movies on a schedule. A few years later, cable TV channels numbered in the hundreds in India. The drawing room is now a battleground for the remote control. The children want cartoons. The father wants cricket, or the news. The women want Balika Vadhu. Timetables are drawn out and argued over. Children’s channels are disconnected during exam times.

The side effect of multiple channels is that now it’s completely possible for you to be ignorant of things that a different demographic is tuned into. Children will know nothing of state funerals. Movie addicts may not even know a test match series is ongoing. It’s a side effect of the development of the medium.

On the other end of that equation, it is now possible to target a given serial or TV event at a specific segment of the population. It is fine, for example, for the music channels to play only contemporary Hindi film music, because only those people interested in it (and there are enough) will tune into the channel. Classical music, or English music lovers, can find their own channels. It is fine for SAB TV to broadcast only light comedy serials, or for the dozen-plus news channels to focus only on news from the Indian perspective, or for a chef to start an entire channel devoted to food and cooking. The days of Doordarshan, of half-hour slots for each topic in a single channel, are gone.

In the west, cable TV has wrought a golden age of sorts for TV serials. The quality of content being produced over the last decade has been nothing short of amazing. The best of talent is now flocking to television, leading to serials and mini-series that are as good as any big-budget movie, and generally much deeper and plot-driven.

In tune with the times

Consumers of cable television are spoilt for choice with all this content. One actually has to keep track of what to watch and when, and make sure to set up the schedule accordingly.

Some say it’s a good thing. In the days before television and radio, almost all entertainment was what was called ‘lean-forward’, or active. To enjoy it, you had to participate, ‘leaning forward’ towards it. If you wanted music, you sang or played, or took part in an impromptu concert. If you were reading, it was work to actually understand the text and follow along. Painting, poetry, walks or lectures, all made you work to enjoy them. But television is what’s called ‘lean-back’ or passive entertainment. You can enjoy it with a minimum of effort on your part — just be a so-called couch potato.

But cable TV and the wide variety of available content force you to be more discerning and active, to make the effort to keep up with everything that’s going on.
So far, all of this discussion has assumed ‘television’ to be a monolithic entity that includes both the instrument itself and the massive infrastructure associated with getting content to it. As we have been seeing for the past decade, this is increasingly not the case.

It started with video games that used only the television instrument as a screen. Then we had VCRs and DVD players that helped you choose exactly what content you wanted to watch, or record something for viewing later. All these make television more ‘lean-forward’. As games and game consoles became more advanced, games became something the entire family could do together. You could even connect with the larger gameplaying community.

But these uses of the television were small-scale compared to the big
leap that has taken place in the last decade: the entry of the internet into the home.

The television industry was smart enough to see that the internet was taking over people’s lives, and the TV would drop out of consumption unless it adapted. And so we had the convergence of the computer screen and the TV, what’s called the Smart TV. This was when the television, instead of being a dumb transmitter of a signal fed to it, has a computer within it, that lets it connect to the internet, play youtube videos, run games, video conferencing, and any number of similar applications.

In countries where the internet bandwidth is good enough, applications such as Netflix, which stream entire movies onto the TV, are very popular. Some of the TV content now being produced is created purely to be distributed over the internet, bypassing the traditional broadcasting media completely. But these serials are still watched by connecting the TV into the internet connection.

Television, which was once in danger of being swallowed by all the new technologies that are coming up, has successfully assimilated all of them and remained the centre of the drawing room. The core idea of having a large screen at your beck and call, to show you what you want to see, and to entertain you when you are worn out from the world, remains a powerful one.

We are heading back towards the ‘lean-forward’ age, where active participation in leisure activities is the norm. But where we were aloof and disconnected from the world once, we are now a part of a worldwide family. For that, we have television to thank.