{"id":218,"date":"2006-08-23T11:37:00","date_gmt":"2006-08-23T11:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/2006\/08\/india-within-reach.html"},"modified":"2011-06-30T20:30:54","modified_gmt":"2011-06-30T20:30:54","slug":"india-within-reach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/2006\/08\/india-within-reach.html","title":{"rendered":"India within reach"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some days back there was a voice message on my answering machine. In a male Indian sounding voice it said, that now Direct TV viewers had free access to Doordarshan India. Imagine that ! Doordarshan in the good old United States ! I am delighted to say the least, although I’m not sure I’ll actually watch it. I mean DDs been there forever, like from the begining of time. When there was TV, there was DD. The kids gasp when I tell them that at one point in time there WAS NO TV (And you were alive then, Mom ?)<\/p>\n

So I flip over to DD last night, and I see a very nice looking, gracefully sari-clad newsreader (Sangeeta Rai, I think) reading news in “shudh” Hindi. So “shudh” that my Star News corrupted ears didn’t actually understand the pesticide (“keetnashak” in Hindi) story until later. But really it was the purest form of Hindi – extremely soothing to the (y)ears . Like one of those Vedic chants; you should get it but you don’t but it’s nice to hear anyways. The kind of Hindi I’d like to hear and get used to, to avoid Hindi hell post-life, from years of having my ears bombarded with the mutated language now used in most “newer” channels. The news was classy too, they didn’t make cheap digs at anyone, didn’t berate, didn’t lament. Reportage pure and simple. Plus I didn’t see any of the overt “flattery” newspieces featuring the ruling party honchos, which were so common before. Like no mention of Sonia and her clan, no obligatory stories on the Congress Leaders etc. Of course that’s just one day.<\/p>\n

Still, having DD is nice. I identify DD with India. It is of India, by it, from it. Yes, it reminds me of how bureacracy (mis)functions, and the various flaws that I associate with governance in India. But it also reminds me of good things, like not everything can be commercialised and spit out for the good of the elite rich.<\/p>\n

It’s good to have DD at my fingertips, good to know that I can watch boring old programming in shudh Hindi pumped right out of the TV in my bedroom. India within reach. Like having a tenuous link restored (and you didn’t even know that it existed).<\/p>\n

Categories : _india , _television<\/p>\n

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Some days back there was a voice message on my answering machine. In a male Indian sounding voice it said, that now Direct TV viewers had free access to Doordarshan India. Imagine that ! Doordarshan in the good old United States ! I am delighted to say the least, although I’m not sure I’ll actually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"twitter_17000648_17000648":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28,10,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desi","category-india","category-tv"],"aioseo_notices":[],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false,"post-thumbnail":false,"sow-carousel-default":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"amodini","author_link":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/author\/admin"},"uagb_comment_info":8,"uagb_excerpt":"Some days back there was a voice message on my answering machine. In a male Indian sounding voice it said, that now Direct TV viewers had free access to Doordarshan India. Imagine that ! Doordarshan in the good old United States ! I am delighted to say the least, although I’m not sure I’ll actually…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":816,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions\/816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}