SEE CHANGE

HOW STAR TV MOULDED THE COLLECTIVE SENSIBILITIES OF A NATION IN 20 YEARS

- ANJULY MATHAI

ANKUSH MAKES HIS living as a witness for couples who opt for a registered marriage in Mumbai. He first meets Deepa outside the Dadar marriage registration office, situated amidst a bustling market. The air is cacophonous with the call of paan wallas and coconut sellers with their rattling wheelbarrows. She is seemingly waiting for an absentee bridegroom. “Sister, looking for a witness?” he asks her. “Only 0200. Standard charge.” She brushes him off, but as dusk seeps in and he sees that she has not left, he offers to help her find lodging for the night. Thus begins a friendship that soon blossoms into romance. The story was one of the episodes titled Witness of Star Bestsellers—a show that aired on Star Plus in 1999-2000. Star Bestsellers presented a ‘mini-movie’ every week, directed by then-unknown filmmakers who are now some of the biggest names in Bollywood—like Imtiaz Ali, Anurag Kashyap and Anand Gandhi.

According to Ali, who directed Witness, those were exciting days to be working in television. “No one really knew what worked,” he says. “Everyone was trying to do different things as we were all ignorant of what the mechanism was that would ultimately strike gold.” Those days, he says, anyone could watch the shows. Later, to get advertisements, the channels started targeting specific audiences. “Subsequently, things became very regimented,” he says. “The corporate work structure came into television and it was no longer a land of dreamers. Directors were replaced by actors, writers and producers. It became a factory.”