From the clothes, colors, landscapes, horizons, skies, flora and fauna, complexions, languages to livelihoods and food; everything changes from one kilometer to the other, when traveling in India, and on getting back, you remain dazed for days until you have put some sense to the collages of recent memory that relentlessly stream your mind and until you have got a handle on the experience you??e just been through.

So from Lucknow to Varanasi, Agra to Ghaziabad and various other cities as we travelled in 2014, my colleagues and I just sat around places, school compounds, tea stalls, neighborhoods, grocery stores, riversides, temples and street corners, chatting with people in various parts of the many cities that we were sailing through.
From a household run by a patriarch retired from a lifetime of service at the Archaeological Survey of India, to his neighbors where three generations of women had never revealed their faces behind their veils to men other than their brothers and respective husbands; every household had a story of its own to tell; and every family in all completeness was watching Indian television as if it were the only window that there was in their dwellings, that was throwing light upon worlds other than their own.
The patriarch, sat on his charpai (a bed made of rope), and insisted that we who were strolling around on the narrow street outside his house, accept a cup of tea which he boasted was best made by his wife; better than all his three daughters in law could make.
We sat with him for a while and he introduced a bunch of kids to us, seven in all, who were his grandchildren, and were playing around him while he watched over them indulgently.

They were modern Indian kids, dressed to characterize the influence that Hindi soap operas have upon masses in India and playing with gadgets that demonstrated the depth of the penetration of brands that our markets have achieved through strategic distribution across the length and breadth of India.
This was a village on the outskirts of Ghaziabad in UP where we were spending the day to observe people and lives.
He recounted his life story in the next twenty minutes while we sipped on delicious tea served to us by his wife who refused to lift her veil to show us her face despite the permission which was granted to her by her husband when he told her that we were only visiting for a few hours and would be leaving soon; so she should not worry about revealing her face to us.
He also told us how he had worked in New Delhi all his life and that his wife had never been there to see him; as a matter of fact never been outside the village even once in her entire married life in which she had given him three sons and three daughters.
All his children were now married and daughters were away, in their own homes.
Then he looked up with pride, his eyes scaling the three-storied house, to tell us that his three sons??along with their families lived with him in the home, which he had built with his savings during thirty five to forty years of service.
He had educated all his children and all of his sons were in government service he told us, with a feeling of great pride and satisfaction with his own achievements.
He smiled from ear to ear and told us that the three sons have their independent kitchens, although they live as a joint family under the same roof; but he clarified that all his sons run their households individually, while he and his wife have their own with the monthly pension that he gets.
He said he hadn?? taken a penny from any of his sons.
I was intrigued by his well thought-out plan and I asked him how he had arrived at such mature decisions, to which prompt came his reply.
He said that he did not want that there should be the ??u tu main main??(bickering) among the women in his family; the kind they show in television serials.
Then he went on to tell me that he had given the same advice to his ??amdhi?? (the parents of his three sons-in-law) as well; and when I asked him if they had been encouraged to do the same, he told me with a faraway look in his eyes that he could only as much as give them advice, the rest was up to them.

Well, our journey had not ended there; it had just begun.
As we went on from village to village, and the by lanes of important cities of Uttar Pradesh to the by lanes of unimportant cities in the same state, the moments of enlightenment were plenty, as a matter of fact, endless.
From a woman who confessed that her first appointment with the realization that she was due to deliver a baby at the age of fourteen came when the baby she was carrying was born in the middle of the night while she was fast asleep (yes, believe it or not, she had hidden her protruding stomach from all eyes in the family out of fear that they would send her back to her parents because she had thought that she had contracted a disease and never suspected that she was going to be a mother); to another telling us that when her eldest daughter got married recently she advised her to watch television carefully for signs of what to do if she gets pregnant, and had spoken no further, because it was taboo for them to discuss anything about what happens post marriage in the life of a young girl.
When I asked her if she had ever talked to her husband about love, sex, pregnancy or birth, she was aghast. She told me that some conversation among the women of the household does take place, but talking to their men about anything of that nature was completely out of question.

There were children who swarmed us when their school closed while we were sitting in its compound, to get photographed by us. They stumbled over each other to fit the frame as we took their pictures and they told us of their favorite programs.
The boys were watching cricket and English films (yes, boys in the age group 10 to 14, some even younger), and loved action movies; and the girls were watching what their mothers and siblings got to see when the men in their homes were not in control of the remote.
Many of them wanted to be actors.
There was a Muslim woman who whispered in my ear, that had I asked her questions at a time when her husband was not present on the scene, she would have given me very different answers; and as we got into our car to drive away from her village, she held on to the window of the car and insisted that we promise her that we will come back to spend some more time in her ??ohalla??(locality).
Her eyes pleaded with us as though she had made note of the fact that we were there to show her a way out of the dregs of her present life.

Our drivers in Varanasi and the tour guide who took us to see the Maha Arti on the banks of the river Ganges wore jeans and T Shirts, sneakers and were modern youngsters who were in anticipation of Modi to have his miraculous effect on their city.
They had voted for him and believed that Varanasi was poised to be a global capital, the Vatican city of India.
But what got me the most was a middle-aged man running a small paan, beedi store outside a school compound in the innermost lanes of Varanasi.
A tiny door through his store led to the narrowest staircase I have seen in my life, which took us to a tiny room in which our research team sat with the shopkeeper?? wife and daughters as they interviewed them.
My American colleague Chris Dzialo and I sat in his store chatting with him and he was asking me about where we were coming from. He told us that he was the father of three young girls, and the eldest who was visiting with her first born, was upstairs with his wife.
I told him that we were from Mumbai and that I was a producer and writer of television serials.
He looked at me silently for a while and then he told me, ??hy do you never show your own story on television; why is it that you keep showing my daughter?? story, which is a failed story, back to her again and again???br />I had no answer.
He went on to tell me that he was educating the daughters who were not yet married. He said, the eldest was now gone, as was destined for her, but he wishes and prays that the younger two don?? have to follow the same path.
He told me that if could find a way, he would like his two daughters to be bold, independent and secure by standing on their own two feet. Like me, like the girls on our team. As we left Varanasi for Mumbai the next morning, the man?? eyes continued to stare at me.
They haunt me even now.

I wish I could get the decision makers in our media to see what an important role they play in the lives of ordinary men, women and children.
I wish I could make them see that the people consuming our stories irrespective of how good or bad they are, are also aching to watch the entertainment that provides them solutions for the problems that they face as they remain shackled in the chains of a static world where all aspirations become dreams unaccomplished and then stagnate.
It is a fault in our understanding of the statistics. A fault with our interpretation of the numbers we hanker after.
In an attempt ??ot to hurt sentiments??(which is a noble thing to do, I agree), which we falsely believe are the sentiments of critical mass, we end up dumbing down story telling to suit fringe elements, empowering the perpetuators of retrogression and halting progress that societies quietly make when they absorb stories that come to them from distant lands.
I have been working with young writers, all of them in their early twenties and loathe myself for constantly asking them to take routes in their narratives that will be acceptable to the channels where we go to pitch our ideas.
I find myself justifying my advice to them with the following lines, ??he audience is not ready for it?? ??he channel we are meeting will not do anything to change the status quo?? ??e have to be careful not to hurt sentiments, as no network will be ready to face the consequences when fringe elements come knocking at their doors to down their shutters??
The recent events with The Interview, a film by Sony Pictures which they feared releasing because of hackers who threatened a 9/11 like attack on America, and then what is happening with the film PK, in India, as fringe elements threaten to break down cinema halls showing the film that throws up the absurdities of religious practices in India; set precedents for the fear that our programming executives and decision makers bear when deciding the route that stories should take.
Taking the middle path has become the concept and maintaining status quo has become the idea.
In the bargain, we have lost our handle on creativity and allowed two generations of storytellers to rot in hell; afraid of the horrors that destructive elements in our present societies, unleash upon us, for telling stories honestly.
Fierce rivalry among businesses make one party celebrate when the heat is upon another, but let us make note here; if we do not get together and fight the forces that threaten to take the world back to medieval and barbaric times, with the power of storytelling which is a greater force than the most lethal weaponry mankind has produced so far, the fault will lie equally with us when this universe comes to its premature end.

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