Nostalgia

Reading yet another take on Aamir Khan's Satyameva Jayate, I went to refresh my Doordarshan memory on youtube. Very few things trigger nostalgia for me as old Doordarshan familiars and I'm a sucker for nostalgia, which works in weird ways. I mean, seeing the Mowgli theme song I went awww but I remember Mowgli used to make me very sad. I'd love to see the dubbed version of Alice in Wonderland in Hindi today, but I used to be very disconcerted by and even disturbed by the story as a child.

TV used to be so rare back then. We had a TV-only-on-Saturday-Sunday rule in the family and as we did not subscribe to cable until I was around 10, my weekend highlights used to include the kids shows in the morning and evening. Before 24 hours entertainment channels or even 24 hours cartoon network, the cartoons used to start around 5 I think, and go on for an hour, hour and a half. Ah bliss!:D There used to be a show once a week called 'Phulwari Bachhon Ki' which I used to LOVE and my mother used to find asinine. Oh oh and the summer shows!! Doordarshan would have summer holiday specials. Sometimes they'd get too educational with a morals filled* stage play (I dislike televised theatre even now), so I'd skip those. But a couple of summers they played Enid Blyton's Famous Five, which I watched hungrily even though the five and even Timmy did not match my mental picture of them in the books.

Like I said. I love Nostalgia :D If you were a late 80s kid, you might remember these.

Remember parents and grandparents setting their watches by the Doordarshan time check?

 I would LOVE for us people to be as 'integrated' (viewer comment) as this video suggests we are. But oh well, look at all those cricketers and athelets :D I love the shot of PT Usha running. There is something so poetic about runners.

Sumana Roy's article on Satyameva Jayate on Kafila, which actually started my youtube search today, mentioned this old public suggestion video. Playing it brought back memories, I realised I remembered this very clearly, especially the guy with a stick singing on top of an elephant. :D

                                         Remember this one?

I could watch this man bowl all day. Ok ok this isn't Doordarshan! But yes, youtube might soon be the only place to watch cricket like this again. DAMN YOU 20/20 CRICKET!

More nostalgia : old advertisements.

*Now that I'm all big and adult-y, I wonder whether many of those plays were like a saffronised 'moral' series I watched in the course of a job. All full of good-girls-in-salwar-kameez versus bad-girls-in-skimpy-clothes-who-the-good-boys-don't-like-even-though-the-popular-boys-like kind of stories.