How well do I remember my childhood? Mostly, just the school picnics, summer vacations, birthday parties, Dad’s India trips etc. So basically I remember most of it. But out of all the things of my childhood I most fondly remember ‘Doordarshan’.
‘Doordarshan’ was often just ‘Door’ with no ‘Darshan’. But even with so many ‘Rukawat ke liye khed hai’ and just plain white noise at times, DD had its own charm. Every Sunday morning my Dadaji instructing Dadi and Mom to have the breakfast ready by 8.45 am so we all (and by all I mean not just my family but our next door neighbor’s Chaudhary Uncle’s family as well) can sit together and watch ‘Mahabharat’ which used to play on DD then at 9 AM. I still remember the sound of the ‘Shankh’ at the beginning of the program and the ‘Yada yada hi dharmasya’ and I get goose-pimples just thinking of it J
DD was good TV. Yes the picture quality was well below average the content made up for that. ‘Jungle Book’, ‘Potli Baba ki Kahaniya’, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ , ‘The Sword of Tipu Sultan’, Some Dinosaur Cartoon which I can’t remember the name of, ‘Vikram Betal’ and so much more which I loved as a kid and secretly still do J. ‘Rangoli’, ‘Surbhi’, ‘Shanti’, ‘Chitrahaar’, ‘Hum Log’, ‘Swabhiman’, ‘Fauji’, ‘Circus’, ‘Tehkikaat’… the list is endless.
There was something else which I dint find very interesting then but now thanks to You-Tube when I came across ‘Mile Sur Mera Tumhara’ this morning I couldn’t believe what I felt. A sense of pride, nostalgia and patriotism all together! It was so overwhelming to know that there are total 18 languages captured in this one song. My memory of the song was lyrics wise ‘Miley sur mera tumhara to sur bane humara’ and video wise Amitabh Bachchan looking extremely handsome and walking forward, looking up at the camera and singing (lip-singing). To my surprise there are so many more celebrities in the video Kamal Hassan, Mithun Chakraborty, Revathi, Jeetendra, Waheeda Rehman, Hema Malini, Tanuja, Sharmila Tagore, Shabana Azmi and the list goes on… And did you know Piyush Pandey wrote ‘Miley sur’?
I guess we just relate to the film-stars better than politicians… ‘Mile Sur’ for me is definitely our unofficial National Anthem.
