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Watching buffaloes on the idiot box
Nothing much has changed in the electronic media since the time TV first came to my hometown and we sat fascinated in front of the idiot box watching government documentaries on water buffaloes plodding through the paddy fields.
- By Mahmood Saberi, Staff Writer
- Published: 01:39 February 2, 2008
Nothing much has changed in the electronic media since the time TV first came to my hometown and we sat fascinated in front of the idiot box watching government documentaries on water buffaloes plodding through the paddy fields.
We could watch the buffaloes only for a few hours during the evening because of the fixed transmission times, and for some reason the people in New Delhi also decided that we in the urban areas should learn about controlling pests when growing crops.
The voice-over in the documentaries would drone on and on as the evening turned to night, but since we had spent a lot of money getting the contraption into our living room, we were determined to watch the buffalos and enjoy it.
Incidentally, water buffalos look better on black and white TV than in colour. It must have been a similar situation in other socialist republics, like China and Russia at that time, where people learned useful things like tightening bolts in factories through the TV.
It took many, many years after Gorbachev brought about perestroika, or reform, when, for the first time gorgeous Russian women came to be seen on the catwalks or clay courts around the globe.
Before that, the only thing we knew about the Soviets was that their women were buxom and good radish farmers, thanks to their controlled TV.
If the movies about buffaloes had continued for some time there would have been an uprising and so the people at the Delhi Secretariat decided to give us entertainment in form of Bollywood movies, on Sundays.
Back-breaking
On the weekend, the TV would be literally hijacked by those who did not own a set and if you walked around the neighbourhood you would see people spilling out of the living rooms and watching the movie from the road.
Later, I left the country to work in the Gulf, and after a few months bought a humongous and back-breaking heavy TV set which took a lot of manoeuvring to fit in my smallish saloon car and cart it up to the flat on the third floor.
A very short Yemeni worker was hired, who looked half-Scottish as he was wearing a sort of a kilt, but he didn't blink an eye as his colleague hefted the huge thing on his back.
He grunted alarmingly as he took each laboured step and sweated profusely, while I made helpful noises in the background. He stopped at each landing and as I tried to encourage him in my inadequate Arabic, it nearly made him laugh and drop the whole thing.
The reason we were doing this inhumane act was because the TV set was so huge it couldn't fit in the tiny, narrow lift.
It took a while to set up the TV; the cable man came and went a couple of times and then finally when the set was switched on the only thing watchable was Walt Disney cartoons. Every evening, after a hard day at work I would come back home, plonk myself on the couch and watch Tom chase Jerry, while finishing bags of potato chips. I think that's how the term couch potato came about.
Finally, my friends and I decided that such a huge screen should not be wasted and we searched the back streets for clandestine videos. These were bad quality stuff and sometimes nothing could be seen on the screen, but we continued watching these videos till our eyes turned grainy and red.
People talk about the power and the potential of the electronic media and how this new medium was supposed to have changed our lives for the better, but I am here now and have a choice of a number of TV channels, but they all look like clones of each other.
Now I watch American soap operas which are as edifying and enriching as watching water buffalos meandering through the paddy fields.
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