My mother: the celebrity

The "good old days" of the 1980s

Hello Gobaljigsawers,

This post is a few days early because I am off to Napoli for a long weekend - my first time out of Spain in the 13 months since I moved here. Happy jig!

Quick appeal up front for you guys to subscribe. You can read this for free, but if at all possible, do pay. I know you wouldn’t expect a free lunch every week, and this is food for thought, I hope.

:-) :-) :-)

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A couple of weeks ago, I posted an old photograph of my mum, Gitanjali Aiyar, on twitter. Within a few hours my social media feed was drowning in likes and retweets; a flood that none of my own paltry writing has ever provoked. My mother, you see, had been a celebrity and an influencer in the 1980s, long before it became possible for anyone with good photo filters and an Instagram account to claim the same.

In the great era of terrestrial TV, she had ruled the screens of hundreds of millions of Indians, first in black and white and later in colour. My mum was a newsreader on the single, state-owned channel, Doordarshan - that equated to all of TV in India - before the advent of cable and long before streaming meant anything other than a verb that applied to rivers.

My mother read the prime-time news in English at 9:00pm, a few days a week for over a decade. She dressed in a saree and wore a bindi, spoke in a starched accent and read out government-sanitised events - heavy on grainy footage of dignitaries meeting other dignitaries - from a teleprompter, and often from pages of paper, when the teleprompters failed, which was often.

In 1980s India - what my children refer to as “olden times,” - the news, dull as it was by today’s infotainement standards, was about as exciting as watching TV could get. The alternative was krishidarshan (literally: agricultural tour) a one-hour daily programme about the latest in seed technology.

TV was only broadcast for a few hours a day. I think it came on at about 6:00pm in the evening, and the minutes leading up to the broadcast displayed the channel’s oddly mesmerizing logo – something that looked like an arthritic supernova glitchily expanding to fill the screen, all to the rhythm of a tune so mournful that it would give the average funeral dirge fomo.  

(Watch it here)

Oh, the good old days!

The funny thing is that if the response to my mum’s pic on twitter is anything to go by, there is nothing sarcastic about that sentiment. Seeing an old clipping of my mother advertising Solidaire, a brand of TV set, unearthed a well of nostalgia that runs deep.

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Here’s a smattering of (unedited) examples selected at random from the thousands of comments I received:

“We grew up listening to Doordarshan News My school teacher always used to say, 'Watch News to pick up your English'. Those were Nostalgia moments.”

“OMG...your Mom was a diva... owe my fluency and pronunciation skills in English to her!”

“Your mum is a legend. Articulate, dignified. She signified a different news experience when the anchor delivered the news and wasn’t the news themself, yet we knew and thought much better of them.”

“We never used to miss the daily Doordarshan news. My brother and me used to guess and bet who would be the news reader every night…What a good time it had been!!!”

“Feel refreshing to see her. She was a good communicator with the right choice of her dress and her expressions - very different than the shouting & intolerant brigade of anchors of today.”

“This pure nostalgic. Used to love watching news. Today it's not news but war room.”

“Please give respect from our side, one her fan. still remember her and all the news anchors of that era. Their Sarees, Flowers in hair, Pen in the coat, the voice, the grace and above all, command over language.”

And, erm, this one:

“These days it is horrible to see our anchors dressing up in western attire. Just does not suit them. Why cant the govt pass an order on the dress code. A bit of Talibanism is required for control”

The truly bizarre thing is that this was twitter and I didn’t receive a single nasty reply. Not one. Well, there was one that read, “You must take after your father,” (!) but that was trolling me, not my mum. It was almost like we were back in the 80s, a time when trolls were gnarly giants who remained safely confined between the covers of Tolkien novels.

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So, my takeaway from this outpouring of affection was that people liked how my mother dressed and how she spoke. Many learned their English by watching her contemporaries and her read out the news. My mum - whom I mostly tend to think of with affectionate frustration as the kind of person who can’t figure out how to use “The Facebook” or work the microwave (“you press the button that says start, Mama”) - had been community, nation-building, marmite-icon and fashion advisor rolled into a nightly package. Wow!

I had been aware of her celebrity as a child, of course. But it was like a distant hum. Other kids watched their mums cook in the kitchen. I watched mine read out boring stuff on TV. The result: I never learned to cook.

Torrents of water have flown down the Ganga since the 80s. And when it comes to India’s mediascape, its another country. From the one-channel era of Doordarshan that my mum encapsulated, the country now offers over 900 TV channels, including terrestrial, satellite and cable.

The number of Indian homes with their own TV set has geysered from 1.2 million in 1992, to almost 200 million currently.

Indians no longer need to watch programmes about harvesting technology alá krishidarshan for their nightly fix. They have a vertiginous choice of sitcoms, soaps, quizzes, thrillers, horror, reality TV, etc etc. And if all of these aren’t entertainment enough, there is always the news.

A proliferation of 24-7 news channels and a penchant for TV news as a Roman arena, has assured this. News in India today is blood sport. It is presided over by self-appointed caesars of morality - the contemporary “news” anchor - who self-righteously pass judgement on the invited combatants, as they shout and rage at each other about caste, religion, politics and every other faultline that splits India into a kaleidoscope of tragedy.

The news that my mother used to read out was tedious and censored in the “public good” as defined by the government of the day. But I suppose, when compared to the three-ring circus of today, there was something soothing about it. We could all go to bed having learned some diction and sleep the dreams of the unaware.  

Today our ugliness is revealed to us in loud technicolour and there is no escape from the nightly parade of riots, lynchings, rapes, cricket betting scandals, farmer suicides, Bollywood inanities and political bile. Newsrooms are public spectacle. And I suspect, despite their addicted participation in it all, TV news audiences feels somewhat soiled by their prurience.

Hence the outpouring of nostalgia my tweet elicited. It expressed a desire for a time when there was less choice and less news, and even the fact that we had less. In the 80s, an ice-cream could make you happy.

And when you watched TV, it was in a crowded room, often with neighbours and stray aunties crammed onto the sofa and chairs, and sprawled on the carpet on the floor. No one had smart phones to commune with, so they communed with each other, humming in unison to the advertising jingles of the few consumer products that made life easier: Hawkins pressure cookers, Harrison talas, Nirma detergent tikias, Liril soap.

Gosh, I do sound maudlin. Am I just showing my age? Is everybody nostalgic for their youth? Why does it always feel like the old days were the “good” old days? Tell me what you think in the comments section, please.

And once again, do consider becoming a paid member of The Global Jigsaw community. I promise you its more edifying than the nightly news :-)