I was watching Hum Aapke Hain Koun the other day and Renuka Sahane's toothy grin reminded me of this erstwhile hugely popular program on Doordarshan called Surabhi.
An ever smiling Renuka Sahane and a somber Siddharth Kak hosted this show sitting on a colorful razai in the studio, while the rest of the team went to remote corners of India showcasing people's talents, bringing exotic locations into our drawing rooms and giving skilled artisans their two minutes of fame.
The 'aaj ka sawaal' and the much awaited hint before signing off made the postcard the most sought after commodity after onions. Each episode saw a new record being created in terms of the number of post-cards recieved. So much so that the government introduced 'competition postcards' to prevent the postal department from running into loss. The lucky draw at the end of the show decided which three lucky people were going to far off lands for "do raat aur teen din ki stay".
I remember borrowing postcards from my grandfather and sending in my answers too; but they never picked my postcard ever! :(
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7 comments:
Yeah, with only instruments playing, it was really good.
Were your answers correct? :)
Nice one. Even I used to watch Surabhi without fail...but never got the answer for aaj ka sawal. Doordarshan reminds me of "Malgudi days"....my favourite.....
Malatesh: Yeah, sometimes I used to get the answers right and it would be even more disappointing then!(though I agree the questions were so tough that you almost felt they didn't want anyone to win!)
And Malgudi days, that was one of my favourites too! It was fun to spot all those familiar kannada actors' faces on National TV; Girish Karnad, Vaishali Kasarvalli and the brilliant Master Manjunath, the director's protege!
gowri everything about the article is fine except the spelling of the word 'somber'.
it should be spelt 'sombre'
did u get it,gowri.
deepu.
Deepu :-) You being in the UK spell it 'sombre' and I being in the US spell it 'somber'!! :-) Not really. It's just that I wrote it in MS Word and Word accepts only the American version of the spelling, and underlines the British spelling. So I changed it in order to get rid of the red mark. :-)
Hell.... now that I check the blog after about 3 days, I suppose I would have to chnge the "Gowri writes, not too often" thingie....
And just wondering, in those days of just two channels, and with people being forced to see whatever is dished out, the serials were better... because the directors had the allowance to experiment, now that they know the poeple do not have a choice but to watch the serials.... So they could make interesting, as opposed to shallow/maudlin thingies that are done nowadays....
Now see, the shallow is easire to sell than the deep.... a "Koolie no 1" is easier to sell to the public than a "Maqbool"..... So as opposed to a 'Neenv' or a 'Lekhu', right now the college based serials will have to be of the "HipHipHooray" types.....
Yeah, I agree with you shomo. In those days with no pvt channels in the scene and no TRP ratings to worry about, DD came up with better programs.
Now, with most channels offering the same mundane fare, the emphasis seems to have shifted to better packaging and bringing in big names to climb the popularity charts. No channel cares to give us innovative programs and interesting storylines anymore. Sad!
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