mind the generational gap

my dad and mum love to watch two tv serials: kahani ghar ghar ki (the story of every house) and kesar (thats the name of a girl). my son loves to watch dora the explorer.i love to watch news at ten.my wife can watch pretty much anything and is not fussed.but the sheer variety of tastes in watching tv in my house is bewildering.of course, i can never tell the difference between one hindi serial and the other. most of them have a rich family in it.

if the daugther-in-law is an angel, usually the mother-in-law is a devil, or vice-versa. they usually have a few murders, rapes, take-over bids, birthday parties, weddings, divorces, deaths, accidents, mistaken identities, baby-swappings at birth and the usual chanting of a theme song thrown in for good measure. most of the characters look the same. sometimes the good guy in one tv serial is the bad guy in the other.

i once told my mum, "dont u think that the name kahani ghar ghar ki is a bit out-of-place? the story in ur tv serial never happens in every household - it is quite unique and comic. they should be change the name to 'kahani ghar ghar ki nahi' or something like that."mum and dad gave me a dirty look like i was some scarred left-over from a rubbish dump the cat had foraged and rejected.

that was the end of my trying to make any sense of my hindi-serialo-phobia.so i bravely tried to sit down with mum and dad for five minutes to join their favourite hindi shows, but ended up feeling totally lost and bewildered. day after day, night after night, they watch the same stories re-hashed, regurgitated, re-created and redeployed in different permutations and combinations, but the essential ingredients are always the same.

don't they ever get bored? but no - o no - they r glued to the tv set in complete and utter dedication.my son is the same - dora the explorer is the apple of his eye, bob the builder is his hero, and the backyardigans are the shennanigans of his comedy store. he can be happily glued to the tv set without batting an eyelid at anyone else for the entire happy hour that his mother allows him to watch every day.

my wife's attitude is the best. " i really dont have to watch every single episode of the tv serials," she explained earnestly. "if i see one episode a month, i can understand the story of the entire month, so why waste time seeing it every day anyway?"

if i am lucky enough not to be in front of my computer, and if i am lucky enough to find that neither the first generation nor the third generation of my family are hogging the remote control, then occassionally i get the chance to see my favourite programmes. these are sky news, bbc news 24 and news at ten.last night as i managed to settle down to a quite moment of news-watching, my 6-year old son waddled down the stairs in his pajamas which were too big for him, and said, "daddy why do you always watch the news? its so booooooring.'

what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gooseling. or is it the other way round?sigh!