Tonight, like most other nights, my chief post-prandial activity was tv viewing.Or rather, it was tv channel surfing. one channel was telecasting the farcical IPL awards, which as we all remember was held on the day the scandal involving IPL mastermind Lalit Modi was exposed; the scandal that was given the moniker of IPLGate by the media.enough evidences have been revealed and umpteen arguements have been put forth to prove to the world that the IPL was aimed to be nothing save a money-spinner for all its stakeholders. but i dont think that the Indian cricket afficionados care much about it-perhaps, they savoured the unfolding of the IPLGate as much as they savoured watching the IPL matches. it is but natural, therefore, to assume that the same people would also enjoy watching the IPL awards. but why it came across to me as such a travesty of an award function is because all the cricketers who won the different awards had already won throughout the tournament, a number of prizes for their feats and yet, they all sat smiling unfailingly at the prospect of being awarded again. some even performed on stage with Bollywood stars and i concluded at the end the torturous ten minutes that i spent watching the funny show that perhaps, every time a cricketer is signed in for IPL, he is told, "You will get the opportunity in IPL not only to hone your cricketing skills but also, to enhance your glamour quotient.
I changed channel and what do i behold? a more glamourous show and involving not pretentious cricketers but the people they try to emulate-the bollywood stars who watched and clapped,as their collegues cavorted and gyrated, with such earnest expressions as if they have been told that they could save the world from Hunger and Unemployment by doing that!i changed channel within five minutes this time.
On the next channel, there was a man who was talking about his annual turnover from his leather factory.for a moment, i thought that it was yet another science programme about some entreprenuer who has found an eco-friendly way of production but it wasnt-the next speaker was a benign look man who spoke how Dharavi is always considered to be synymous with grime,poverty and anti-social activities and how utterly wrong such assumptions are. i immediately knew that the show would be rivetting.Gradually, the show deconstructed the myths about Asia's largest slum, situated right in the heart of Mumbai.Dharavi may come across as the receptacle of the entire city's filth but the truth is it is here that recycling of all kinds of garbage is carried out so that the rest of the city can breathe clean air.it is assumed that the impoverished and the unskilled languish in Dharavi but the fact is that it is this slum that is the hub of all kinds of low-capital but hugely productive entreprenuerial activities-from the production of designer leather goods to the manufacture of plastic goods, to the mass preparation of nutritious and cheap food items like idlis and vada pav, which are enjoyed by thousands of Mumbaikaars every day. as the amazing show advanced, it highighted how the women of Dharavi have taken the initiative to maintain communal harmony in the area by forming their own welfare board. the show ended with the same benign-looking man commenting that the residents of dharavi have, during the nearly hundred years of inhabitance in the area, built up amongst each other a complex symbiotic relation of economic cooperation which no urban development plan can overlook as insignificant. before the authorities go ahead with their grandiose plan of transforming India's financial capital Mumbai into Shanghai, they ought to look at the city through the eyes of the residents of Dharavi to realise that Mumbai comprises not merely of plush Nariman Point or swanky Malabar Hills but of hundreds of lanes,narrow and dark seemingly,but where thrives a thousands of dreams.
I watched the show,enthralled and at the end of it felt none of the rancour against the Idiot Box which i had felt while watching those strange award shows, and actually experienced a kind of satisfaction. not so much because i could now absolve mysef from the guilt of watching asinine stuff on tv but because telivision and satellite telivion to be more specific, which was a marve for those of us who were kids in the ninetees,still has food for thought to offer, it still can stir souls and shape creative perspectives of its viewers.
