Indian Television

Sama

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cloudchaser

If you were in Chennai then you are likely to have seen more of the South Channels where their antics freak even me (an original Mumbaikar)

j/k -

Its likely that you have seen just the South Indian channels - there are tons of channels in India now and they run the usual gamut of shows from LOST, Desperate Housewives etc to Friend re-runs etc.

But the bigest explosion in TV channels has been in the news segment and from what little I experience when I travel to India they are more on the tabloid side of reporting. You also get the standard BBC world service, CNN etc. too.

But the staple fare in Indian television is mainly soaps which are painful and unbearable (never been able to sit through one of them myself). So each region has the same fare and the only variation is language.

Star TV (owned by Mr Murdoch - *spit * ) http://www.startv.com/eng/frame_schedule.cfm

Zee Networks are the biggies. I am not too clued up on the South but think Raj TV is one of the biggies.

Along with the above you also have the standard Sports Channels - ESPN etc which cover most of the major sports events worldwide live. Tennis, F1, Football etc.

You then have the music channels too MTV etc. where the fare is a unqiue mix of English and Hindi.

What you must have seen will be some of the shoe string ones which buy cheap content i.e. old shows and re-runs.

If you want to know more about Indian telivision then this industry site called - not too surprisingly - www.IndianTelevision.com will be quite helpful.

Ohhh and the fact that in most of India you get all of the above for less than Rs.400-600 a month - so thats close to a 100+ channels for under a tenner - thats one thing I miss about India !! I pay close to £20 a month for some basic channels here in the UK.

Happy viewing

Nick-H

I don't have a television in my Chennai house

There is cultural stuff, though, too. I've often whiled away a late hour or two watching some dance that is obviously serious, but that I've never come accross, and never found out what it was.

Then there's Fashion TV. Just occasionally I've been that bored during a sleepless hotel-room night.

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Priyamav

Amitabh Bachan, also known as "Living Legend"...

raos

OP is right on. Indian TV IMO is incredibly mindless and melodramatic. Think of it as "Bollywood-lite." The reality is that the Indian middle class doesn't really want to think about anything too serious or real, after all look what's outside their door.

BTW, the "Big B" has had some well-documented money problems. It probably explains why you could possibly see him walking around wearing a sandwich-board and advertising for the local highway dhaba! Luckily for him, over-exposure is not a problem or even a concept in Indian popular culture.

cloudchaser

Amitabh Bacchan is THE MAN in India and his appeal crosses over from the youn to the old, rich to the poor and dare I say to the other non-Hindi speaking regions too.

He was the first "anti-hero" in Bollywood starting in the 70's.

Bollywood before AB was all chocolate/pretty boys - i.e. heros with lipstick.
He was pretty prolific in the 70's and 80's but slowed down later.

The 90's saw a brief flirtation with the "corporatisation" trend in Bollywood and he launched AB Corporation Limited. Briefly the managers there had bigger egos then the humble man itself and to top it they were pretty incompetent too. The company kind of went under and was almost bankrupted. AB being a man of honour and principles took the hard way instead of letting the company go bankrupt.

To dig himself out of that hole he has launched himself into one of the most and amazingly stretch of work covering every boody thing that could be sold and branded with his mug.

Apart from his earlier movies, creatively I feel this has been his most effective
period - with his taking on unusual roles and movies. There have been some duds but by and large the Indian public can't have enough of him and even today he is the man.

A quick google should dig out quite a few more resources to follow up if you need to dig deeper.

kiranlal

hey yoga girl the indian televison is very serious, really belive me. what ever you seen is, they were just making fun of Americans

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Digital Drifter

You don't want to know, trust me on this!

Mind numbingly boring across the country. At least that part of national integration in India has worked.

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rangss

I might get a few brick bats....but I seriously believe, Indians do not take television seriously...they got better things to ask for in life than TV programming. So they take what is thrown at them and watch it and forget it...except for a few (or many) women who need their daily chewing gum soap operas.

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rangss

Exceptions: NDTV, Star News, Aaj Tak, Headlines Today...I prefer them any day to any American news channel or BBC.

slakhs

Television programs, even more than movies, are made to cater to the local populace. The Tamil programs are made to gain TRP ratings from the 60 million odd Tamils in India and elsewhere, not for one Yogagal who probably will spend a couple of weeks in Chennai (and who cannot understand Tamil). Same is the case of other language programs too.

To say that my likings and taste are more refined or evolved than yours is snobbish and elitist, to say the least. A serial like Sopranos is so totally out of cultural context in India. US has more than 200 channels showing programs 24 hours a day and how many Sopranos and West wing are there and even there, it is Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond or even Jackass, which get the viewership ratings. The ratio of good programs versus junk will probably be the same across all countries. (0.1:99.9 perhaps).

With warm regards
slakhs

Digital Drifter

Slakhs, point made. At least /I/ wasn't trying to make that inference and nor was anyone else, to be fair. In so far as my view goes, I believe my dad who says TV dumbs you down(but he watches all the cricket on the telly, go figure)

But /I/ do find all the channels boring including the news which seems to ape the west channels.

kiwi_razz

After returning to Bangalore from a break of four months, my company organised to get our cable TV reconnected. Having no TV for 3 days was a hideous nightmare so was happy to be reconnected no matter how dumbed down indian tv is, until about 5 hours later and this happened:

http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanhe...2362005101.asp

D'oh.

shanthi

........as long as you're not looking for Jerry Springer.......

Nick-H

Just because something apeals to a lot of people does not make it good. Very often, worldwide, the opposite is true. Check out some of the crap on British TV!