Yeh Kasauti Majlis Ki, Honorable Member!

Stolen from Haveeru Daily (Yeah we are a lazy bunch; get over it)
Originally written by Ahmed Rushdie

Who’d have believed this day would have come so quickly? Not me definitely… yet here I am, ready to take back every mocking, sarcastic, mean thing I’ve ever said about the so-called Dhivehi film industry. Since that probably entails everything I’ve ever said about the industry, there’s undoubtedly a lot of things to take back; but I feel it’s justified.

It all started when I found that I had too much free time on my hands and took it upon myself to find out what the big deal was with all these new TV series that kept popping up in discussions whenever I got together with my friends for a tea or coffee. Heroes, 24, My Name is Earl, Lost, Prison Break… I had apparently been missing out on a lot of quality TV. What’s the secret of the island? What do the numbers mean? What new power will Peter Petrelli absorb and when will he finally faceoff with Sylar? When is Michael going to put that goddamn tattoo to good use? How much more unbelievable and eventful can one day be? It seemed that if I didn’t want to feel lost or come off sounding like I’d spent the last few years living under a rock whenever I got together with my friends, I was going to have to get a crash course in current culture by spending a few months camping in front of the TV.

The things we do to keep from becoming social outcasts.

Not surprisingly, my new lifestyle (involving heaps of ordered junk food, soft drinks, ton of CDs and DVDs, a DVD Player, a TV, a comfortable pillow and a blanket laid out neatly in front of the TV) didn’t go down too well with my wife. For one thing, she didn’t like having to sleep alone. And for another she didn’t like the fact that I was cutting into her Kasauti time! And by that I don’t mean just the Hindi soap Kasauti Zindagi Ki; I mean every soap they showed on Cable, plus their Dhivehi counterparts aired on TVM.

Why anyone would want to watch an inferior clone of a Hindhi soap opera is beyond me but it appears that most local women just can’t have enough of women in heavy make-up and glittering expensive jewellery, sneering, talking to themselves and laughing evilly at being the source of all woes and misery faced by a particularly hapless and clueless family.

Can anyone say ‘gender insensitive’?

Anyway, that’s beside the point. The result of the faceoff between me and my wife ended up in a compromise where I had to watch at least one Dhivehi soap in return for her watching one of the English TV series I had been watching non-stop. She nearly pulled a fast one on me by agreeing to watch Desperate Housewives, but in the nick of time I wised up.

So next day, after forcing my wife to stay awake for the first episode of Lost, it was my turn get tortured with an hour of TVM. Taking a deep breath, I did something I had not done for years: I clicked the remote and switched channels to TV Maldives. Needless to say it’s been a while since I last saw anything on TVM and despite expecting some changes in the programs, I was not prepared for the level of change and quality the channel had gone through. My wife had not been able to survive the nail-biting suspense of the first episode of Lost and had retired to the room where I presumed she had fallen asleep before reaching the bed. So I was left to myself as I ventured into frontiers of entertainment I had never before experienced... on TVM or any other channel.

Two minutes into the program on TVM – some courtroom drama as far as I was able to gather – and I was hooked. You could have reeled me in and made a barbecue and I wouldn’t have noticed. I had earlier criticized Dhivehi movie makers as being completely witless and unable to understand comedy even when hit full in the face with a custard pie. How wrong I was. The dialogue that flowed flawlessly out of the actors were absolute comedic gems, full of wit, dripping with sarcasm and overflowing with humour; the insistence by everyone to refer to everyone else as ‘Honourable member’ in spite of the evidence to the contrary was particularly memorable. The constant interruptions, intermingling dialogue and over the top speeches, they were all on a level never before seen in a local movie. Not to mention the amazing and realistic acting by everyone concerned, not seen in a Dhivehi production unless of course it involved a man harassing, ogling or pawing an actress in the name of acting. It was only when the program had come to an abrupt stop just when things seemed to be building to a climax that I realised that I had been literally sitting on the edge of my seat and that I had been gripping the chair with hands that had now turned almost white from lack of circulation! With grudging admiration I had to agree that not even Prison Break had been able to get me involved in the plot like the local TV program had been able to do.

It was only later that I realised that the annoying banging drums, crashing cymbals and deafening background music that accompanied every little twist in the plot, hallmark features of the Hindhi soaps and the Dhivehi counterparts they had spawned, were mercifully absent from the program I had watched. Also gone were the repetitive zooming facial close-ups that had acted as time-wasters due to lack of enough ideas and action, and would go on for minutes at length in the Dhivehi soaps that I had seen previously. In fact, I hadn’t even been able to recognize most of the actors and actresses who had given such heartfelt and award winning performances. Only the guy who had played that genie in Fathis Handhuvaru was familiar and even he had given the performance of his life. This new breed of middle-aged actors has totally crushed the younger generation of actors, I thought to myself and snickered at the irony. Eyoopee and Sea-xahn can only dream of being this good.

Exhilarated, not even feeling a little bit sleepy and wondering what will happen in the next episode of Majlis Miadhu, I crawled into bed and confessed to my wife, who had indeed fallen asleep half-on, half-off the bed, that I was ready to take back all the bad things I had said about Dhivehi dramas. She woke up from her slumber long enough to mutter an annoyed “You suffering troglodyte! That was real!”

“Yes dear, I know,” I said, lost in admiration for local soap-operas and too excited to even think how good they would be in the future. “It was just so incredibly real!”