TV!

TV entered my home in 1982, when I was 17 years old, just entering college. It appeared so unfair, the TV entering my home just when I was leaving home for my college life.

Those days not every household had a TV, and when you entered a lane it was easy to see who had a TV.

There was this massive TV antenna raising many a meter from the top of the roof of the house. It looked more like one of those transmission towers that you see nowadays, erected by the mobile phone firms.

The antenna was much bigger than the TV itself.

It was obviously a black and white TV, small at a mere 17”. (There were smaller ones available, but my father was feeling a bit indulgent) and telecast was twice a day for a total of about 7 hours, if I recall well.

It was mainly news, agriculture, culture and some tepid advertisements.

There was just one state run channel called DD and a few years later a second channel was added, called, DD Metro, and as the name suggests, it was restricted to only Metro cities, and my town was just a tad bit above a village in the pecking order.

There was entertainment too, an hour of film songs on Friday evening, where the living room of my home was taken over by the whole colony.

The TV was the most prized possession of the home then. We had a box to house the TV, the box had a sliding door and kept closed when the TV was not turned on. It was cleaned quite regularly and to an absolute outsider the treatment meted out to the TV had the same level of dedication that was reserved to the Gods.

My grandmother, the original film buff of my family, she used to see at least two films a week, week after week till just two weeks before she died. Those last two weeks she was confined to her bed. My standing regret is that a TV was meant for someone like she, and she never lived to enjoy this.

But one of her daughters, my aunt, substituted her, and we got to see what I knew I would have gotten to see if my grandmother had lived to see the TV. When the TV started showing regional films, my aunt could not be moved even by a tsunami, till the film ended. Those days, Tamil film had a wonderful villain by name M,N.Nambiar, an absolute gem of a man in his personal and social life, but on screen he was villain personified. He destroyed good families, swindled hard earned money from the father of the hero, raped every woman he came across, stole even from temples (sacrilege at its nadir), tortured children, smoked, drank and usually died or imprisoned towards the end of the film before the hero and the heroine slipped into one of the songs that they first sang before the intermission. My aunt who would be seated comfortably in her chair would show first signs of agitation when MNN first appeared on the screen and as his nefarious schemes unfolded one after the other her agitation would rise exponentially and she would leave her seat and take a confronting standing position, and her distance to the TV would decrease, and soon she would be hollering insults and start praying for unspeakable death to strike him. By the end of the film she would be physically drained. And this repeated predictably and without fail.

We were mean. We used to sit back and have more fun watching my aunt having a go at the TV instead of watching what was on TV. Her sister, another aunt of mine, was the same. It must have been coded in their DNA.

TV continued to be a part of my life even after I went to college. My college had a general-purpose room in one of the hostel wings which housed magazines, books and the TV.

My first recollection of that TV taking center stage was in 1986, when Mexico hosted the world cup. That the world cup happened entirely during our study holidays before our final semester did not have any influence. Most of us had secured a job or finalized our post-graduation universities and we were not too worried about the final semester.

We had all crammed into that hall with hardly any standing space, glued to the Argentina – England match. We saw the hand of god goal! And minutes before THE GOAL, the power went off and when power returned we saw that Argentina had scored a second goal. One of our friends, Dayanand, who had sneaked out and listened to the commentary on his radio transistor, came back and explained the inexplicable goal. Those were not the days of instant uploads or YouTube and I saw that goal nearly three years later!

As the years crawled on, the entertainment part as well as the hours of TV time per day, both improved, in quantity and, alas! as was expected the quality took a nose dive. There used to be a “the world this week” a Friday night capsule that captured the world news, produced by two impeccable presenters one of whom would go on to launch the massive NDTV that is one of the behemoths today.

We also had a lovely Quiz Time, hosted by two other perfect hosts. That the woman Kavita Agarwal resembled the woman that I was in love with, who I would go on to marry, added to the spice.

Then came Live Aid and we got to see all the greats that we had heard only on Vinyl or on those TDK / Sony tapes.

There was a lull when TV and I had to part company. I finished college and moved to Bombay for my job and the first 5 years in Bombay was a constant shift from one apartment to another, from one corner to another, a constant see saw. I finally settled into what would be my home for the next decade, just before my wedding, and the present from my friends on my wedding was a 14” B&W TV.

I do not remember the brand now, but the carton had a dancing “Nataraja” on it.

By this time the prime minister and his finance minister launched some daring reforms and opened India to full globalization.

The antenna that was bigger than my TV, could finally go and we entered the cable television era. Still nascent days. But, we had now five channels and 24X7 TV. The TV in our home was constantly playing only MTV.

And I was listening to November Rain seven times a day, seven days a week, week in and week out!

Up till this stage all the TVs I had, were those without a remote. The channels were selected with a series of push buttons and volume and contrast could be adjusted through dials and knobs on the TV itself.

1995 saw the transformation of the next step in our TV association.

For the first time, we had a 25” TV, a color TV, no less and with a remote. By this time the channels have multiplied and the Bruce Springsteen song “there was 57 channels and nothin on” was suddenly apt.

Came 1998, and we all gathered up in my boss’ home, who had gone one up on me, and bought a Sony Bravia 29” color TV, then the meanest and the biggest in our colony, for the inevitable world cup, being played in France.

India, in those days, had only two teams to support. Brazil and Argentina. It was before English Premier League became what it is today. So, all of us had settled in comfortably with something to munch about and more to drink and by the half time we were completely lost. Not many in our group knew someone by name Zinedine Zidane. We were so much in mourning that we hardly watched the second half, and it was only the next day that we found out about the third goal of France!!

We moved cities and soon we upgraded ourselves to a 29” TV too and then came the LCD TVs.

And when we shifted our home for the fourth time in four years we finally decided to get rid of this bulky, heavy 29” TV and brought in a sleek 32” LCD that was wall mounted this time. By this time the number of channels went beyond any meaningful comprehension and added to those channels the local cable operator was playing at least 4 channels mainly focused on films.

HBO entered and started playing English films with subtitles and suddenly our understanding of the films went up tenfold. The worst part of this phase was the blooming of news channels where comperes and anchors were shouting and howling and arguing and provoking and instigating beyond levels that were already deplorable to start with.

Now it was time for us to move countries, here we upgraded ourselves to a 40” LED.

In the beginning, selecting a TV was a simpler affair. Now it has become too complicated. And in the new world of TV, size matters. The present TV in my home can accommodate me within the frame if I try to place myself horizontally along its diagonal. In addition to the sizes, now you have HD, UHD, 4K and on a recent visit to the electronic shop I saw 8K.

The TVs are no longer a straight rectangle. It is now curved. It is getting thinner and thinner. And it is Wi-Fi ready. Most homes now use the TV to watch YouTube.

The worst aspect of these new age TVs is the fact that there is nothing you can do without a remote. True to its name, it is often in some remote places and you spend quite a lot of time searching for the remote.

I can’t operate my TV without a remote, today.

The TV age is probably over. Most of what we need to access, be it news, clips, highlights, we end up watching on our mobile. (There must be another blog about phones soon)

In the last one year I watched the TV only during the Champions League and the world cup this summer. I surrendered the cable connection and I am still stuck with few national channels of Czech Republic, as it is part of my internet package.

My prediction is that TV for home entertainment will soon cease to exist. It will meet the same fate as that of a landline telephone we once had. Remember the Bakelite contraption with a spring-loaded dialer?

All the TVs in the nearby future will be for display in public places like bus stops, train stations, pubs, restaurants, hotel lobbies and airports.