Last week for Lounge’s special issue on ‘How India Loves’ I worked on a story (The pecking order)  that talked about daily soaps in the Hindi GEC space going the Mills and Boons way.
Now, I don’t often watch Hindi daily soaps, so I really did not know what I was signing up for when I decided that as part of my research for at least 2 week before filing the story I would see all the soaps starting from 8pm. My evenings would start with Star Plus, move on to Sony TV with a little bit of Zee TV and Colors thrown in. There was hardly any breather between the sessions and sometimes (just sometimes) my need to see something funnier would prevail and I would stray off to catch That 70s Show’s reruns on Comedy Central.
As a part of my research for the story I also visited online forums dedicated to these soaps and that is where I made a few astounding discoveries: there are actually people who spend their entire day posting possible scenarios about future episodes; some write short stories about the characters; others get disgruntled when the soap is not progressing in accordance to what they perceive is the right away to go about it; and many spend time counseling each other on why they must stay with the show even if it’s story is going south . There are arguments, “bashingâ€, makeup sessions.
These people are invested, really invested in how the story progresses and obsessed with the characters and actors. They make an effort to track the director, production house, script writers, even TV journalists who visit sets to get that little piece of news about their favourite show. Some create “indexes†(essentially lists) of all their favourite scenes from all the episodes that have aired till date. Others make mini videos or VMs as they are called with the latest songs as the background music and scenes from the soap which fit the song.
The other strange discovery was that most of these online fans are not homemakers or students or for that matter all women. Some are men who obsess over the female leads as the women do over the male leads. Many of them are executives, some even with jobs that entail global travel and yet they do not forget that essential appointment with their favourite daily soap. Not only do they view it online from whichever part of the world they are at, they even take time out to comment and make observations about the progress of the story.
Yet, the voice of this lot seems ignored or unheard by the appointed channels personals. The ones I spoke to said in clear terms that these soaps are made not for the youth or sophisticated, urbane audiences but for women who will stay with their soap 5 days a week, women they believe reside in smaller cities of India.
After all urban audiences have many distractions: malls, eateries, movies, Internet but women from smaller towns in India make a special effort to stay with a show they like. Yet, the kind of audience that channels believe is not really interested in these daily soaps seems equally most invested in them. So are the channels wise in ignoring this audience? Maybe not but as of now these online fans do not count in the TRP race. Perhaps until these people do not count in the TRP race, the channels really have no choice but ignore them. But when online audience will start to be factored in what makes a show popular, perhaps which is when Indian television will go through a shake-up it really needs at present.
