Indian Television

As much as I'm doing my best to see all the sites, get out and spend as little time as possible in my room while I'm here, I have done my best to watch and take in Indian Television (TV being pretty important in my life and all). Most Indian TV channels are in Hindi with the exception of a few English movie channels, ESPN, CNN, and VH1, which mostly plays bad MTV shows, South Park, and music videos. There's also one channel that seems to play Friends 24/7. The Hindi shows vary from entertainment news shows to channels constantly playing strange, smiley, bearded gurus preaching to the camera to channels that are very Telemundo-esque playing cheesy comedies and soap operas. Most channels however just play Bollywood music videos.

One very common thing here is American Idol style performance competitions. They're seemingly everywhere. There is this MTV show which is a contest for twins, though I can't really figure out what exactly is getting judged about them, they seem to just come up, answer a question or two, then move on. It's produced a lot like any other MTV show, overdone "cool" shots, bad interviews, etc. Anyways, here's a clip, which you should be able to get a lot from because they use about half english half hindi.



also there's Li'l Champs, a competition show for children only. Here's a clip I like a lot that also shows Indian Televisions love of using weird sound effects all the time, especially when something is funny.



finally, there is this girl who I see ALL THE TIME on Indian TV. Apparently her name is Saloni and she won one of these competition shows called Chote Miyan Bode Miyan. I have no idea what that means and no idea what she's saying in any of her performances. It appears that she's hilarious, and let's hope she is because, like I said, she's on TV all the time. Here is a clip of Saloni as a Police Inspector. This is pretty much what all of her performances seem to be, she comes out in some different sort of costume and performs a little show with a man. Again, I have never had one of these translated and could find no videos online with subtitles so I can only hope she is as funny as everyone seems to find her:



For a while I was thinking about just how strange Indian television is and was going to write a bit more extensively about that. But then Michael Jackson kicked the bucket and they started marathoning his videos on VH1 and I started to realize that of all the strange things I'd seen on Indian TV, it was no stranger than pretty much every music video Michael Jackson made, and no worse than most of the schlock on American TV. Still though I've found myself sticking to the English movie channels more and more.