Started writing this last Sunday. Could not complete it then.
Just back from watching two of my favourite programs. There was a time when Sunday TV was something you could look forward to. Then came cable TV and a general deterioration in Sunday TV programming. But things seem to have improved now and you have quality programming that you can actually look forward to. One of them is 24 hours on NDTV.
The basic idea behind the program is to spend a day with a certain segment of (Indian) society thereby providing an insight into their life - kind of a slice of India in 30 minutes. Various episodes of 24 hours have allowed the viewer to go on a road trip with truck drivers, take calls with a call centre agent, spend a night in the maternity ward of a government hospital in Rajasthan, dance to the beat of chutney music from the carribean and trade punches with women boxers from Maharashtra. It is the sheer diversity in the choice of themes and locations that is the primary attraction of the program.
Of course a good idea does not always translate into a good product - there is always the little thing called execution and execution is where 24 hours excels, the star of that execution being the host Radhika Bordia.
The most striking aspect of her reporting is that you get so little of her. Unlike most of her colleagues’ hers is not an obtrusive, brash form of reporting. Taking the backstage herself, she allows her subjects to talk - talk of themselves, their dreams, their fears, their disapointments, their joys. It is not an easy task. These are ordinary people, almost all of whom would have never been on camera before. One would need to win their trust to make them speak and she does that with surprising ease. For someone who is able to empathise and strike a personal chord with a diverse section of people, she never comes across as being intrusive or patronising. Blending smoothly into the lives of her subjects and immediately becoming one of them, she provides a close and personal look at her subjects without in anyway taking away their self respect or dignity.
And this empathetic approach extends to her team, more specifically her cameraman (camerawoman rather - she is a she). I am not an expert on camera angles and artistic shots. And if not for the fact that I actually sat down and thought about it, it would have never occurred to me that none of the subjects seem to realise its presence - so too do the viewers. Its almost as if one has been transported to the setting and is part of the action being staged out. The closest word that I can come up with is ’’natural’’ - every single shot to the very last details seems so natural that is can only be that !!!! There is absolutely nothing that has been stage managed for this program.
Between them, these two excellent professionals do the almost impossible task of capturing the essence of a country that is as varied, colourful and so full of contradictions as India. And they do it in a manner that is warm, gentle, mostly uplifting and always optimistic.
The best part of the program for me however is the fact that it takes me back to a world that I once knew and loved, a world that I know still exists, a world that is just minutes away from where I live and yet seems so far way.