17 May,2009 11:07 AM IST | | Nikhil V
It's the coolest show to watch. But now, this underage 'cute' jodi is the nation's darling and even 'couple of the year' on the cover of a magazine. Why does Balika Vadhu have to make child marriages so delicious, asks Sunday MiD DAY reader Nikhil V
'Oh, she's so cuuuuute! Ekdum choti si dulhan...'
Everyone I've talked to about Balika Vadhu says this. In some form or the other. She's cuuuute, they're cuuuute as a couple, and everything else is forgiven. (And as fairness creams not their ads, but their sales in India have shown us, beauty is all that really matters.)
So there was a resistant teacher who spoke against this initially, but she got knocked out of the show after a few episodes. Now Balika Vadhu has become this great soap where everything looks grand and pretty nice clothes, exotic havelis and the usual family, saas-bahu, traditional functions.
The fact that two underage kids got married on the show, are still married AND IT'S ILLEGAL has stopped to matter. And not just that. We're (probably) the only country in the world where a child-marriage show can top the charts and the lead kid actors become Couple of the Year on some magazine cover. Because she is so cuuuuuute! They are so cuuuuuute!
And you see, suddenly how from the issue, we have quietly shifted to the image. We're talking aesthetics instead of ethics. Classic showbiz hyperbole thrown when there is no reason in what is being done and shown. Don't blame the messenger they say, we're just a medium. But unfortunately, the medium is the message nowadays.
There was huge concern about the lives of the Slumdog Millionaire children being spoilt forever once the stardust stops to fall. Well, what the lead child stars of Balika Vadhu will go through is nothing less. A Slumdog child might still adjust to living in the slums, too young to understand how life has shut its doors on him or her again. But for a middle-class, educated kid, becoming a poster-child for something as ridiculous as child-marriage and not realising its portent, is far more harrowing than I can imagine. Now that girl IS the country's Balika Vadhu (she does ads, TV appearances and live events in her 'dulhan' dress) and seems quite cool about it. That's her identity... and just why must we be okay with that?
I'm from Rajasthan. I've been in school with children who got married when they were seven-eight and got sent off to their villages as soon as they finished Class 12 (a child marriage, 'gona' after education, the only saving grace). Some of them were brilliant students, like the didi across the road who used to wake up at 5 am to study. She's now the mother of a seven-year-old who will probably never know how educated his ghoonghat-covered mother is. And there are so many others, now trapped in the sand swirls of some god-forsaken part of the desert, tending goats and camels. I've even seen a reaction to the show from my community: "Now at least someone understands our age old customs and traditions!"
Child marriage is nothing even half as pleasant as the show portrays, the problems not one-millionth as simple to solve. Sure, we have to make it palatable for an audience to make them listen, but do we have to make it this delicious?
The people who need to realise the ill effects of this practice have no access to television or even education. The ones who do are fascinated by Balika Vadhu's episodic story and are missing the point (if there is any, other than the Television Rating Points, for the show's makers). So where are we? Nowhere. Which was always the intent, I think. To make an entertaining show, nothing else. What it ends up auto-suggesting is not our problem.
Every culture is becoming a strict, standard fight and flight response to 'modernism' the classic 'going back to a simpler time'. And it's happening all over the world. Religion and tradition have become extremely stringent, exclusive and obtrusive. And, as is with every event in the history, the ones to feel this shift the most are the women.
The next time you get appalled at the Taliban lashing a poor girl in Swat Valley while surfing channels during a Balika Vadhu commercial break, try not to feel too good about yourself. Because both are demeaning and endangering women. One is overt and the other covert, something we in India have a tradition of doing. The craziest, ugliest of things and covering it all with words like 'culture' and 'customs'.
This is a country where a leading political and royal family's bahu proudly proclaims in an international fashion magazine that she got married at 16. It's a society which still doesn't want to educate girls because 'uske baad par nikal aate hain' (and this is in families living in hovels as well as highrises). This is why a show like Balika Vadhu is under the same scanner, as far as social health is concerned, as smoking cigarettes on screen.
Because that's what it's getting away with for now a small statutory warning at the end of the show a throwaway 10-second message that says some random social 'truths' and attempts to warn us that this practice is injurious to health.
I remember a scene from a Paddy Chayefsky film Network (directed by Sidney Lumet), where one of the protagonists, Howard Beale, a TV presenter, loses his cool over the way the world is. He starts telling people on television, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore." People all over the city start opening their windows and screaming it out onto the streets, echoing his sentiments. Well, this was me, leaning out of the window and yelling, "I'm as mad as hell and I am not going to take this anymore."u00a0
I hear no echoes across the city.
The writer has been trawling the television and film world for over six years now, as writer, producer,
unit-hand, editor, cinematographer, director and now, with this, as critic
