India’s public broadcaster Doordarshan, or DD, hasn’t dominated the ratings there for years, but it started rerunning its 78-party Ramayan during the nationwide lockdown:
Doordarshan viewership has since jumped to hundreds of times regular levels in some slots, reaching hundreds of millions of viewers, according to television ratings company Broadcast Audience Research Council of India. The series is set to end this week.
Suman Nagalia, 69, loved Ramayan when it first came out in 1987 and is now watching it again with her children and grandchildren. Her extended family of eight enjoying it together has helped reassure her during the nationwide shut down.
The television show’s brightly lighted scenes stuffed with colorful characters and extras in wigs, heavy makeup and bright costumes bring to mind grand old movies like “The Wizard of Oz.” The pace is more telenovela: lots of intrigue punctuated by long pauses to zoom in on the faces of actors reacting.
The new generation of Ramayan fans are sharing Ramayan memes on Twitter and TikTok videos of kids lip syncing dialogue and families worshiping the images of the gods by putting garlands near their televisions. There is even a hashtag, the #Ramayaneffect, to describe, for example, how children are purportedly more respectful after watching the show.
Arun Govil, 68, the actor who starred as the hero Ram, experienced adulation during its first run but says it has reached a new level this time as possibly even more Indians are watching it than in the ’80s.
He had basically ignored social media until last month, when the followers on his Facebook account shot up to more than one million. He started posting life-lesson videos for them and has been swamped with messages.
The Hindu before the Islamic invader had an outstanding culture for thousands of years.
Who can blame Modi and BJP for wanting to restore the glory?
Some British movies of the 1950s and 1960s had a quirk that drives me nuts. They’ll zoom in on someone’s face until all you see is the section from upper lip to eyebrow. Or, even worse, they’ll zoom and park on an ear, or their hands.
I guess it was a style then, like the wibbly-wobbly bouncycam is now, but even when the super-zoom was on a face, there wasn’t enough of the mouth visible for me to catch what they were saying.