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My Experience with Television in this trip

Inspired by Suhit's post World is Green : Suhit Anantula's Blog on Rural India: Television : An Engine of Change

There has been much talk since the last round of Assembly elections of how people voted for bijli, sadak, pani but if you explore the meaning of this in some depth, as I have lately been doing, you find that people want to live like they see people live on television. They want water to come out of taps in their homes. They want homes that look like houses and not mud huts. They want electricity so they can watch their favourite programmes on television and not just to run the tube well. They want their children to go to schools that have proper classrooms with chairs and tables, they want mobile phones and Maruti cars, and they want their sons and daughters to get jobs in proper offices and not just in the fields.

Television has acted in rural India as an engine of change. Us intellectual types bemoan the evils of MTV and Hindutva’s culture police fear that our ‘‘ancient civilization’’ will fall to pieces when it clashes with America’s instant culture but for the average Indian television has brought the 21st century into his cloistered, blinkered world. And, you cannot begin to imagine what a closed world it was not so very long ago.

In the recent trip that I made to India, I was glued to television a lot mainly as it is cricket and elections season. To my surprise, I realized that TV medium in India is slowly but surely getting more matured. There is a serious shift in the programming from the soap operas to burning problems. Especially in Andhra Pradesh with the launch of a new 24 hours news channel TV9, things seems like changed a lot. A few good things from that channel are:

• The channel is almost real time and reporting seems completely impartial.
  
• I heard that, the channel became a huge hit with in a month of launching it.
  
• I was pleasantly surprised to see women wearing suits and speaking in nice telugu on the channel, this for sure instills a new image and pride of telugu in the minds of telugu speaking people.
  
• A program '9PM with Ravi Prakash' which is aired live everyday at 9PM is one of the most watched program. The talk show host Ravi Prakash travels across Andhra Pradesh and conducts talks shows on the problems in the city/town/district/mandal by inviting the politicians and common people. This show is conducted almost in open air with guests sitting under a tent, very economical and natural way of taking TV to the common man. Common man is getting a chance to voice their problems/frustrations/opinions and get an immediate response by the local politicians live on TV. This is for sure a real innovative program. Taking talkshows to the masses and help to hightlight and resolve the issues. I just loved this concept.
  
• This channel has revolutionized the news casting and gave new life to impartial/bold journalism. Need to see how long this tempo is going to stay.
  
• Heard that there is a new channel SATYA, coming up in the same lines of bold journalism.
  

People are not shy in voicing their opinions on the live TV actually they are convinced that this is a way to make their voice heard. For example in Andhra Pradesh there are programs like 'Dial Your CM' where Chandra Babu Naidu is available on TV live every morning for about 1 hour answering the questions of people. Most of the times people complain about the problems, but I have seen lots of people actually questioning him about his policies and giving him suggestions which is kind of dream come true for a common man. Even more interesting this is that, in the local channel 'Siti Cable' there are weekly programs like 'Dial Your Collector' (Not sure is 'Dial your MLA/MP' are there or not), which give opportunity for common to reach the collector/local politician just with a phone call. And they know that their problems are atleast heard, if not solved immediately.

As a whole there is lot of information that is pumped into the living room of common man through the idiot box and as written in the article its for sure acting as an engine of change for rural India. People are constanly knowing about new happennings across the world, becoming more knowledgeable, more critic (well criticism is the first step towards wisdom) and last but not the least dreaming about a better future.

To summarize I was able to see true the meaning of 'RIGHT To Freedom Of Speech' and 'RIGHT To Freedom of Information' becoming a reality.

What do you want to call this PHENOMENON?