Reality Shows Steal Real Lives!
Posted 27th October 2009 at 05:02 AM by rvnachar
REALITY SHOWS STEAL REAL LIVES
What did we do in our childhood? We never had television. We never had computers. Neither did we have toys or electronic gadgets to play games. How did we spend our time? I can bet. No child today as much fun as we had in our childhood 45-50 years ago, though we had no external device to play with!
We played outdoor games for hours together. The unfriendly weather of Hyderabad, where I spent my childhood hardly mattered. I don’t remember of ever complaining about the heat or sweat, as much as I complain about the weather in Bangalore now, when Bangalore is much more comfortable when compared to Hyderabad. Except for a skipping rope that one out of ten children owned, we had no other toy to name! Yet we could play for hours. There were so many interesting games like gilli-thandu, marakothi, hopping, police and the thief and what not! All we required for a few games were stones, a stick and pieces of wood, all of which were picked up from the street! We had no inhibitions and girls and boys played together, though the society as such was much more conservative then! Every street had loads of children playing on the street. The traffic was so limited that no parent ever worried about the children running around on the streets. There were quite a few play grounds for the older children to try cricket, football and other formal games. Nobody complained about children playing the parks.
During holidays and festival seasons, we enjoyed the social festivities. Children went from home to home to view display of Ganesha during Ganesha Chathurthi and varieties of dolls during Dasara. The whole city wore a very festive look with children dressed up in colourful attires roaming around with excitement and bags to collect the tasty eatables that every family distributed as prasadam. Elders too enjoyed festivals. All the family members got together at one place, cooked delicious traditional food stuff, ate and rejoiced together. We would have batches of friends visiting us during festivals. These were the main source of entertainment for elders and children alike. We found creative ways of entertaining ourselves – putting up shows of plays/dances/music at home, decorating our houses for festivals, conducting competitions among ourselves and what not! We never felt bored. Radio was the only external medium used for occasional entertainment. It was fun listening to the radio programmes of plays, sound tracks of movies, music and news. It helped us improve our concentration and imagination.
Things have turned topsy-turvy in just the last 30-40 years! All with the entry of electronic gadgets into our lives! Just enter any house during prime time. You will be lucky to be welcome heartily. All the eyes of the family members would be glued to some show or the other on the television or the computer. Soap operas, films or reality shows or game shows will be taking away all the attention of the members. You would be an uninvited guest and will be made most uncomfortable so that you leave them free to watch their shows! This is the state of most of the homes, except for a few that make it a point that the idiot box either does not take over their lives or it never enters their homes!
Coming to the kind of shows that majority of the people watch, it is a sad intellectual deterioration that is going on, because of so many reasons, the main being:
a. Visual medium gives us no scope for imagination and all our creative skills get killed; when we listened to dramas on radio, we had to be attentive and imagine all the scenes that the characters and the background sounds tried to create for us but now everything is readily available. While watching programmes on the television, our intellect almost goes for a nap. Many a time, it is astounding to realize that even simple advertisements go beyond our heads, because we watch only the visual treat and forget to analyse the messages!
b. Most of the channels air programmes based on films or reality shows or meaningless serials, which hardly require any intellect to understand. It is disgusting to watch the innumerable number of reality shows of various kinds. People wash their dirty linen in public. You switch on the television at seven in the evening and your mood which actually has to be most romantic and alive switches off because somebody or the other is crying on every alternate channel, discussing his or her personal problems with a beautiful hostess! If not, sob stories about bad mothers-in-law or daughters-in-law are shown. The worst kind of reality shows are those like the Big Boss or the shows which test the guts of the participants. Why should we be wasting time watching some bunch of odd people living in one house and fighting among themselves? What intellectual value do such shows have? The participants in some shows are made to do most disgusting acts like living in a cubicle with snakes, eating eerie worms, staying in ice boxes or jumping off high cliffs putting their lives into danger. People are ready to do anything for the money that they are going to earn! How can somebody select his or her life-partner on a television show? Has life become so cheap and public that it entertains the world?
The worst of such reality shows is the latest one in which some couples are made to live with strange toddlers and bring them up in camera for us to watch! What rubbish! Imagine the trauma that the infants undergo being handled by some strangers who are neither trained to do the job nor have any emotional attachment towards them. Is there no limit upto which people can go? Is this creative? Begetting children and bringing them up is such a holy and personal experience. Why cheapen that in this way? We talk so much about child labour. Is this not a torture to innocent children? So, now it is the fad to do all that we enjoyed privately in public just to earn a few thousands!
c. There are very few shows that treat our brains like quiz shows, talk shows, debates, travelogues or documentaries. Actually, some very good discussions, interviews and documentaries are aired by Doordarshan channels but hardly anybody watches them. The technical quality of some of Doordarshan channels is so poor that we get irritated. For example the Lok Sabha channels airs very good programmes but the quality of telecast is very poor and the audio gets interrupted every few minutes. This has been happening since long but has not been set right. Who would want to watch such a channel? Should not the authorities pull their collars up and improve their standards to compete with so many private channels?
d. Creativity seems to have drained off! Every channel only copies what another
channel is beaming. So, you have the option of watching the same show in English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu or any of the Indian languages and nothing different! There is absolutely no originality or substance. Kids are taken off their schools and colleges for months together to sing tutored film songs or dance to their tunes in different languages on different channels! Thousands of children are losing their childhood in this manner. A seven or eight year old kid talks and behaves like an adult and the parents enjoy that! Just yesterday, I saw a nine or ten year old kid bravely accepting defeat on a music show, while the mother is crying incessantly! Parents are becoming immature and torturing young kids to achieve impossible targets! Where are we moving? Gone are the days when kids were rebuked for listening to too much of film music or singing them because of the adult content in most of the lyrics! Now, the parents proudly watch their eight and nine year old children singing or even worse dancing to vulgar lyrics, wearing suggestive dresses and being teased with romantic comments by the judges! How many parents train their children to participate in quiz shows in comparison to those who train their children to participate in music and dance shows? Hardly a handful! Glamour seems to be the in-thing. Every parent wants his/her son or daughter to become a playback singer in Bollywood and earn fame and money, even if he or she does not get to go to school or college regularly! What a state!
It is high time we realize the ills of such developments and correct ourselves. It is high time we realize that all our children cannot be achievers in music and dance or all of us cannot earn millions by participating in some useless reality shows. Let us get back to our normal lives, give our children their childhood and make useful individuals out of them rather than trying to make Lata Mangeshkars or Kishore Kumars or Helens out of them. Say no to meaningless reality shows. If you have a problem, go to a Psychiatrist or a counselor rather than a reality show hostess!
Sudha Narasimhachar
Total Comments 10
Comments
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Wow!!! I don’t think this can be put in words any other better way, you have said it right. Kids now a day are mostly glued on to video games, PS2, PS3, Xbox and all sorts of stuff. When I was saying a younger cousin of mine how exciting my childhood days were with all these outdoor games, he wondered how bore the life was without all these electronic gaming devices!!! Yeah his way of having fun is no longer the way I had my fun. About T.V. shows I just have one remark “!!!!!????” This applies to all those stupid ads also that are being aired on screen. What with all these products which claim to make out a champion of your daughter or son!! Now a day ads have only two themes to deal with; either sex or making your child a champion. Meaningful ads can really be counted on our fingers. It is better not to say about the different kind of reality shows that are being telecasted. But what do the channels need? TRPs. It is obvious they are getting what they want by casting all these stupid shows else there won’t be a rise in such programs. And there is no prize for guessing how the TRPs shoot up. Recently I read a news paper article about a new reality show, it goes like this. Celebrities or rich people are made to stay in Mumbai slums with a girl/boy. The participants are given tasks which are to be accomplished to help your friend achieve his/her dream. The prize money is some lakhs or crores. Channel claims that they are airing this to show the world Mumbai slums are not as bad as outsiders think and to provide an opportunity for those there to achieve their dreams. I hope at least this show is not taken into the dramas and holds on to its motto till end. Being a grownup it is completely up to us as to what is to be watched in the television, no one will force us to watch what we don’t like. So we can’t blame the T.V crew alone, right?Posted 27th October 2009 at 11:47 PM by amihere
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Sudha,
you hit the nail hard.
Real lives just waste away cheering the reality shows.
I hear lot of stories about parents chiding/comparing the kids with the ones that perform and degrading too.
i get so irritated when i come to know of these type of things.
let me stop here. a good thought provoking one..Posted 28th October 2009 at 05:52 AM by Shanvy - Dear Sudha
so true... the think that all parents have to learn to accept is that not all kids can be number 1 and so to accept your child as they are and to bring about a positive growth in them by tapping their resources is so much more important in the long run.
These days everybody wants a super intellect all rounder baby... infact the other day I even got a mail saying that there is an organisation which helps you to ensure that your baby is "SUPER" from the womb!!!
with such opportunities i wonder whre the "average" child will go???
KPosted 29th October 2009 at 01:52 AM by feduptocore -
Dear Sudha,
You have hit the nail on the head. What all you have written is the glaring truth. Children are exposed to unwanted things. Many ads spoil the children.
I know women who watch the tear jerking endless serials endlessly. Stories of scheming mils and willy dils should be condemned by women, but unfortunately they are viewed and even become the topic of discussion. All good inventions in stead of taking man kind to higher level is misused. Cell phone was a great boon as long as there was no camera, but now how it is misused by unscrupulous people.
A good thought provoking write up,
PSPosted 1st November 2009 at 05:58 AM by Pushpavalli Srinivasan - Thanks to all my friends who have responded with so much of involvement. Every medium has its advantages, as long as it is used in the right manner. Like even medicines can be poisonous if taken in overdoses! There were such standard programmes aired on Doordarshan those days, when we had only one channel to watch! Even serials were based on good novels like Buniyaad, Tamas and so on. Even today, if one is selective, there are a few good programmes. But the percentage of junk programmes is much higher and only these programmes are watched in plenty! Kids have to be really really strong mentally to remain 'normal' with so much of pressure from all sides.
Sudha NarasimhacharPosted 4th November 2009 at 08:05 AM by rvnachar
