Ekta Kapoor thinks she was a ‘spoilt rich brat’; she must feel she has sufficiently grown out of at least two of those three self-proclaimed vices since. For she expounds, ‘Frankly, I think Indian plots on television are more superior to those on international television.’ She points to what she describes as ‘progressive ideas’ and proclaims that American television rarely handles ‘adult themes’ like those shown on Sailaab and Hasratein with any sensitivity. Then this young producer mocks, ‘They (American television) have not got over themes such as incest and child abuse.’

Kapoor has produced what she refers to as a ‘mega-successful family comedy’ comprising a harried father virtually run over by his wife and a surfeit of women in his household including his five daughters; there is also a photograph on a wall of a woman, presumably dead, who comes alive every now and then to also harangue the man. Her other creative offering has a middle-aged widow, at most times tremulously unwell, getting her daughter married into a ‘good family’ in the same city without checking at all on the bridegroom or his credentials. It is left to the daughter—otherwise sharp and voluble—to discover on her wedding night that her husband is very obviously mentally deficient; her character is not given the option of talking to the boy before marriage either. She must now live with, and like, this retard or else her widowed mother will collapse with a shattered heart. A ‘progressive’ idea?

Consider advertising films: little girls, invariably to the exclusion of other kinds of dresses, in spaghetti straps and other suggestive clothing, complete with curls bobbing about their carefully painted faces; Lolitaesque mode. (‘My daddy’s the strongest!’ My mummy? Oh she is washing the toilet, frying puris in the latest and best oil which will not give my daddy a heart attack, or she is out at work where she gets so exhausted and filthy that she needs the strongest tea and the best germicidal soap when she gets home.) The little boys in these ads then, how can they not be men-in-the-making? Reconfirming this at the end of every second advertisement on television is a male voice-over, that deep but fruitily friendly paternal voice of authority suggesting you buy the product. Women’s voices at the end; sure, they are there so that you do not think advertising is a man’s world, as they are for sanitary napkins, lipsticks, nail polishes but not necessarily shampoos.