Those were the days ...

Continuing with my "deprivation series", here is another posting of mine that dwells upon deprivation. Again, its the kind of posting which will make sense only to those who have lived a similar "deprived" childhood. According to the official statistics, more than 85% of India's population has experienced such a childhood of "want and deprivation". Since i am too bugged myself ( examination blues making me all jittery and nervous) to play any guessing game over here, i kill the suspense. I am talking about the kind of childhood spent in homes where satellite television made a real late foray. By late i mean not until 2000 AD. So you can easily arrive at the number of years (approximate that is ) of my life which have been spent living in what can be well and truly called "television's stone age". This in turn means that i had my more than fair share of "Krishi Darshan" looking at the clock waiting for the next program in the pipeline - mostly it used to be the still-going-strong Chitrahaar. Doordarshan inculcates in you loads of patience. Krishi Darshan was only one of those several mediums used by Doordarshan to this end. The inevitable and excruciatingly agonising brakes in the form of compulsory transmission of proceedings of the parliaments that used to come in between the live telecast of cricket matches tested your patience to the limits. Almost everyone (just tell me one person who actually bothered watching these parliamentary proceedings in all its gory details ? ) prayed that somehow one of the parliamentarians would go crazy creating a ruckus leading to an early closure of parliament's session. Quite often, our prayers were answered. Then more often than not, Doordarshan ran short of soaps and ended up with a retelecast (or reretelcast or even rereretelecast) of the same soap ( deliberately keeping it short of "opera"). Then there was this higly irritable World Of Sports where all you ended up watching was a kabaddi/kho kho match between two unheard colleges of some unheard university based in some unheard corner of Haryana. When you really ran into luck, you would be treated to the live telecast of a durand cup match between Mohun Bagan andMohameddan Sporting Club.
After enough of venting out my spleen on Dordarshan, i must also heap deserving praises and shower accolades on DD for the unforgivables that it has delivered with not quite clockwork regularity. Who can forget Ramayana or Mahabharata when the roads became deserted - a performance that captivated the imaginations of old and young alike. "Byomkesh Bakshi" was no less than Sherlock Holmes and then there were those a-bit-corny-but-still-entertaining Tehkikaat and the still going strong Shaktimaan. Added to it were the absolutely amazing and awesome tele adaptations of the equally wonderful short stories written by the likes of Anton Chekhov ( how can one who has grown up on DD forget Chekhov ki Duniya ?? ) and O Henry. And DD deserves a big big thanks for never letting the K factor dictate terms in this world of crass commercialisation. All said and done, i must point out that i have moved away from those days of yore and now subsist on the dose of programs dished out by my new dish connection. But DD has its own place of pride in my schedule; that is when i get to switch on the idiot box.