The missing moments on the small screen

Recently, I received a WhatsApp share with a picture of a boy standing near a TV with the caption “My parents had a TV like this and I remember because I was the ‘remote’”, and with greetings on World Television Day.

This made me go down memory lane recollecting the good old golden days of television at our home. It used to be a luxury in the 1980s and if you had a colour television, then you were a VIP of the locality for sure! Before the entry of our own TV to our drawing room, I can still remember myself standing on the street, watching through the gap of a window, the World Cup matches, Oliyum Oliyum or a few scenes of Tamil movies.

Sheer obsession

Televisions started entering the drawing rooms slowly during the 1980s and the sheer obsession to watch Chitrahaar, regional movies or cricket matches can hardly be forgotten. Similarly, serials such as Discovery of India, Ramayan and Buniyaad made the entire family with neighbours sit before the TV well before the show. The limited sources of entertainment in those times explain the immense popularity of Doordarshan. Our home in Thanjavur will become a movie hall on weekends, especially Sunday evenings, with diverse viewers, consisting mostly of my school friends and neighbourhood uncles and aunties, thronging our home to watch feature films. DD was telecasting regional movies in alphabetical order and it would be a long wait before a Tamil movie is telecast. This made us watch classic Bengali or Kannada movies too and till today, the habit continues. We would be looking forward for weekends as my mother would make hot pakodas or bajjis to make the experience a truly entertaining one. I remember rolling out mats for children to squat and chairs for the elderly to comfortably sit and watch Ramayan. I cannot forget that my mother prepared semiya payasam and offered as neivedyam on the day when Rama Pattabhishekam was telecast. It was all fun and joy. Similarly, I am reminded of viewers praying, eyes closed and hands folded, when the war scenes in Ramayan were telecast.

It seemed that television became a very prominent way to entertain the whole family, during its introduction and watching television together as a community was a unique and blissful experience.

It became a routine sit-down for us to watch these shows, while eating dinner or doing chores, all with the entire family and neighbours coming together.

The highlight of those days was the pure camaraderie and close social bonding exhibited as one enjoyed with their near and dear ones as a close-knit community.

When I reminisce those days, I cannot forget another interesting experience too and that is about TV antenna! The taller the pipe, clearer will be the signal and every house would fix antenna pipes, a foot taller than their neighbours. In Thanjavur, we had the luxury of receiving signals from Roopavahini, national channel of Sri Lanka, in addition to Kodaikanal DD! On cloudy days when the signal was unclear, it was always the last child that will be looked at and I was always given the unpleasant task to go to the rooftop to rotate the pipe affixed to the antenna. It proved to be a wonderful lesson in synchronisation. It was a challenge every day to keep the antenna intact as even a small wind can play spoilsport! With no remote, we were used as remotes to change the channel, adjust the volume every now and then. Of course, it was a good exercise indeed!

But, today, it is problem of a plenty and we don’t keep watching a single show at a stretch. Everyone has a gadget that provides all of what we were getting through a single television set for whole home. The coming together, sharing of laughter, enjoying a cover drive of Viswanath, watching an old movie, waiting for the famous number in Chitrahaar have become a thing of the past. The TV set, which was once a VIP at our homes and was a unifying force, remains as a silence spectator, embracing the changes gracefully though.

k.murlidar@gmail.com