Kyunki main bhi duffer hoon
Published by Yazad Jal June 3rd, 2005 in Culture and SocietyOf late, I’ve been watching bits and pieces of Ekta Kapoor’s “K” serials (around 10-15 minutes at a stretch is all I can bear). And I’ve noticed strange stuff. No, it’s not the regressive portrayal of women, e.g. all the “good women” are housewives, career women are mainly bitches, nor is it her excessive portrayal of religion, including women fasting for their husband’s health. (I’ve never seen an atheist on her serials)
This is about two techniques used in most of her soaps. Every major dramatic scene is repeated thrice. Mother slaps daughter. Slap. Daughter’s face turns with the impact. Cut. Mother’s hand rises again to slap daughter. Slap. But this is not a second slap. We’re simply seeing the first slap repeated. And for good measure it’s repeated again. I doubt if anyone’s been slapped just once. It has to be slap, slap, slap!
Advance notice is given just before a bitch is about to commit a bitchy act. If it’s Komolika in Kasauti, the soundtrack will belch “Nikalllll.” Only then can the viewer be shown the bitchy act, otherwise she might die of shock. For Mohini in Kyunki the soundtrack moans a longing “Moh-heee-neee” before she swishes her luxuriant locks and does the evil deed. Luckily Amrita Singh escapes the sound treatment in her serial. For her it’s the lights. Suddenly the screen turns green, and hey, you know the bitch is on the prowl!
It’s not that these are tricks shown for effect once in a while. They’re shown every time. But why? I have a hypothesis. Ekta Kapoor thinks her viewers are very dumb. So she dumbs down the content of her serials to be able to reach the supposed mental abilities of her audience. She thinks that unless she repeats a dramatic scene thrice, you won’t get the melodrama. Unless the soundtrack utters stuff or the lights go green, you won’t be able to discern that something not-nice is happening. You’re not smart enough to understand a storyline on your own unless you’re given scene repeats and sound / light clues. It has to be rammed down, rammed down, rammed down.
26 Responses to “Kyunki main bhi duffer hoon”
- 1 Trackback on Jun 13th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
Dude, were you not watching Hindi movies in the glorious 1980s, with the lightning and stuff during dramatic scenes? The three-slap trick and other cues for the dumb viewer are old hat.
Yes, but I was hoping against hope that we’d moved on. Plus most movies used the tricks maybe once or twice. The most dramatic scene. Here I suppose you’d see it thrice in half and hour. And every serial every day to boot.
Maybe it (the repeats) is also another way of wasting time. I am sure these repeats help eat into some valuable time. That way the scriptwriter (or whoever writes the story for the episode) doesn’t have to think of moving the story forward or adding another twist — just repeat the same “dramatic” bit three times. And then an ad break.
Yazad, the Tamil serials are even worse. In a ‘family scene’ that typically has about half a dozen people, every key piece of dialogue — and there are quite a few of these in each episode — is followed by a close-up of the reaction of each individual in a sequence, and many times this sequence is repeated. Worse, each close-up lingers a bit. I think it is just a technique to stretch things, so that each ‘normal’ episode becomes at least two ‘megaserial’ episodes.
lol:)
it is supposed to increase dramatic tension in a scene.
but a more cynical view is that if you have to repeat the same scene thrice - then you are actually producing less. in an industry where every single charge is by the per hour rate - that’s a lot of savings!
ekta’s inspiration is all those terrible & garish ramoji rao movies her dad acted in - tohfa, mawali etal! so its’ little wonder that she uses their shooting style as well
Obviously, she hasn’t heard of Stanislavsky. Having just completed an drama class in which it was brought home to us that we must believe and be believable without the aid of any external objects (costumes, sets, etc), I am anxious to see examples of this in the Indian scene.
Picking on a different point, *of course* you’ve never seen an atheist on her serials. There are no atheist Indian women remember?
And that is a darn tragedy. Been looking all over for ‘em. :(
sorry off topic,
MadMan,
They believe in God because they need to hold someone responsible for creating Indian men :-)
its the melodrama repeat I say!
the slap, the edit, the cut, the music, the beat, the glaring eyes and trickling tear.
it is melodrama we need, and what better way of heightening the drama than repeating it…(ram it down ,ram, ram it is)
As Amit Varma put it once in a different context,these serials try to “manipulate our emotions”, with jarring music, unnatural close-ups, storyboard effects, et al. For decades, Indians have been brought up on this kind of fare and the residual effect on their brains can be imagined.
Arthur C Clarke wrote a short story once on aliens sending a pilot mission to Earth preparatory to an attack. The “pilots” get hold of a videotape, which the aliens view back home and conclude that the Earth is inconquerable. It turns out to be a videotape of a Walt Disney cartoon. Similarly, if aliens were to get hold of a tape of a Hindi serial, they would conclude that we were a bunch of hopeless imbeciles, not worth conquering.
I’ve not seen any of Ekta Kapoor’s serials.. and suspect that my tolerance level would be even lower than Yazad’s.
Maybe she is dumbing down, maybe she isn’t. She seems to be doing something right — her serials have been extremely popular.
Who are we to question the market?
However, all her serials seem to be able to am sure that I’d echo Yazad’s post and the comments here..
I think Ekta doesnt treat her viewers as dumb, in fact she knows that her viewers are multi-tasking between cutting vegetables, putting children to sleep and watching her serials. These gimmicks are to ensure adequate attention to the never-ending twists to the never-ending tales.
Another dramatic effect that gives me fall-from-the-seat laughter is the extension of what Abi says when it comes to high emotion close ups. Not only is there the totally unnecessary close up, but also the scene is shown at a 45 degree angle on one side with the picture breaking as we move closer to the face of the actor. The same thing is repeated at 45 degrees on the other side within a second.
Looks like Ekta has a secret pact with all eye doctors. Did I spill the beans Ekta ?
Another thing that I find extremely irritating ( and the firang serials are to blame equally) is the the extremely loud “laugh tracks” in all the comedy serials. Total putoff. I mean…if people don’t get the jokes, they won’t watch it anyway…why prompt?
somehow the slapping you were talking about reminded me of the “Friends” episode where Joey gets a new brain and Susan Sarandon slaps people really hard that their cheeks get swollen.
Vikram I find the artificial laughter unbearably irritating too but another reason for its inclusion could be because the jokes may not actually be that funny so the producers got the bright idea of trying to induce laughter.
crazy thought….imagine a Saas-Bahu serial with the inane artificial laughter ? ha ha what fun ….maybe then I’ll watch an episode !
Though I agree, with you, theres is no point blaming Ekta Kapoor. She is merealy playing to the gallery. I read a BAchchan interview in which he stated to a similar query that if 800 million ppl(twenty years ago) wanted to watch this what could he do? In MBA they teach you that you have to produce what sells, not the other way around. God knows when the tastes of majority Indians shall change.
hey, you missed out mentioning the color changes to black n white and shadows during the dramatic scenes. hahaha, but quite an apt description i must say!
Is this Indian TV? wow it sounds worse than even American stuff. I think the technology of television has some inherent quality which lends itself to trivial matters. The first broadcast was of a man blowing smoke rings, and removing and replacing his glasses.
Ekta’s serials sell. I fear the market.
PLEASE THE INFORMATION ABOUT THE
PREVIOUS AND NEXT EPISODES OF KYUNKI
PLEASE THE INFORMATION ABOUT THE
PREVIOUS AND NEXT EPISODES OF KYUNKI
PLEASE GIVE THE INFORMATION ABOUT THE
NEXT EPISODE IN KYUNKI SAAS BHI KABHI
BAHU THI
why is it that all Ekta vamps roll their eyes? If we can identify them just by looking at them, then why can’t the tulsis and the parvatis? Are they that dumb? The Ansh killing scene in Kyunki took the cake! She employed every damn trick in the book!
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha…………..dat was sooooooo funny!!