Paromita Vohra: The way [V] were (like this only)

It was 1994 I had been out of the country for exactly six months When I left there were two television channels When I came back there were a dozen or more Among these was Channel V and it had already released the amazing landmark Quick Gun Murugan spots and added something heady into the airIn those early years I freelanced there for a short time first as a writer on Javed Jaffreys popular show Flashback and later as an actor playing a character called Aunty 303 laukichopping mother of a golmatol boy by day and sidecarscooter riding vigilante by night in a series of black and white shortsIllustration Ravi JadhavGrowing up in the 1980s it was hard to imagine that a time would come when knowing Hindi film songs and having desi general knowledge would not only come in handy but would actually be cool Being into Hindi films was definitely considered infradig even though everyone liked to watch ChitrahaarChhaya GeetYou could admit to liking Zeenat Aman but not Reena Roy Coolness meant Western popular music and movies and you foregrounded that interest and knowledge Channel V reconciled these divided selvesIt was an avalanche of sensory pleasure without purpose music videos and mashups bilingual and trilingual puns familiar everyday figures like acerbic bais and class teachers turned into iconic characters It remixed different worlds to create an audiovisual carnival drawn from the entire archive of desi street and nonclassical culture Silent film kiss scenes mythology ladies and gents toilet signs barakhadi charts mixed thrillingly with European avantgarde and American indie aesthetics all held together in the channels selfembracing byline we are like this onlyIt is not that none of this existed before in media Films like Sholay on the one hand and Kamal Swaroops densely packed Om Darbadar had existed and both were in fact major inspirations to the people working at the channel then But Channel V presented it lightly plentifully 24 hours of enjoyment where there had been weekly halfhours of ChitraharChhaya Geet a never never land of sorts for a country redefining itself It throbbed with contemporaneity a sensual enjoyment of the present and all its possibilities And from it grew a whole new musical culture a mischievous Hinglish and a kind of youthful erotics all of which were eventually subsumed into Bollywood Many of todays internet forms memes Instagram character videos and short films first sprouted in that particular television worldFor many people like me this kind of language opened up the possibility of expressing myself as a mixture of all my different ongoing cultural influences rather than adhere to the formalities and political templates of an earlier generation Though commercial there was in early Channel V the necessary indie spirit that is needed to actually create a new cultural worldLast weeks announcement that Channel V was shutting down marks the end of a certain postliberalisation phase where this youthful hedonism has turned somewhat dystopic It is a time when a spontaneous youth culture is difficult to grow in todays commercial mainstream segmented cautious secondguessed by market research manipulated by algorithms We must wait to see where newness will now emerge it always does But for a couple of decades Channel V was a libidinal whirl to which we say a fond but sad goodbyeParomita Vohra is an awardwinning Mumbaibased filmmaker writer and curator working with fiction and nonfiction Reach her at wwwparodevipicturescomCatch up on all the latest Mumbai news current affairs from Mumbai local news crime news and breaking headlines here