Olympics-The India Story by Boria Majumdar & Nalin Mehta

Author:Boria Majumdar & Nalin Mehta [Majumdar, Boria & Mehta, Nalin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9789350295090
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Published: 2013-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

APPU ON INSAT:

THE TRANSFORMATION OF INDIAN TELEVISION

Six months before the Asiad, in May 1982, India Today carried as its cover story a review of Indian television. The headline—‘The Tedium is the Message’—left the magazine’s readers in no doubt about its views on the industry. It began with its authors imagining the state of television two years into the future. In light of what was to happen after the Asiad, it deserves to be quoted in full:

1984: It is a television boom the like of which India has never seen. From the slopes of the Malabar Hills in Bombay, to lush green pastures near Meerut and the sprouting urban jungle of New Delhi’s Defence Colony, the fashionable New Alipore area of Calcutta and the trusted old Anna Salai Road of Madras, it is the same old spectacle of thousands of TV aerials sticking up in haughty silhouette.

The Indian channels are humming with cascading electromagnetic waves—some skimming along the earth, others ricocheting back from the two Bharatiya pies-in-the-sky hovering 26,000 km above the ground. Giant microwave towers have been set around the nation like stiff giants.

The TV commercial section never had it so good. The three daily Chitrahars, with three 10 minute slots on sale, are each fetching Rs. 2,000 per second.63

Then the authors return to reality, arguing that this futuristic ‘scenario is comic, conjectural, satirical, emphasizing the dark side of the millennium’. In their view, the ‘bumbledom of Doordarshan’ had so far only confirmed the ‘idiocy of its originators’; it had not ‘merely standardised mediocrity but institutionalized it’, mired as it was in a governmental ‘Rip Van Winkle slumber’. But the article was written because the authors had noted that Indian television now stood on the brink of what they called ‘the ‘Great Leap Forward’, ‘the biggest ever in Indian broadcasting’.64 They described the massive overhaul that Doordarshan was going through as it sought to create a nationwide network ahead of the Asian Games.

In order to understand the pivotal role of the Asiad in creating such a network, it is necessary to recount a short history of the medium in India. The next section outlines the contours of this story before returning to the Asiad and what it meant.

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