Nostalgic Nostalgia :) - Tribute to DD

CHERISH YOUR GOLDEN - OLDEN DAYS

A tribute to DOORDARSHAN ...
our entertainment destination on the idiot Box in those old times ...

The generation gap. Stuff that those who belong to my generation will identify with...that people even a few years younger won't. Because they belong to the new liberalized India with cable TV and all that.

National integration videos:

The ek chidiya one, the one where people sing in different languages- mile sur mera tumhara...where I'd pretend to sing along with the languages and dialects I didn't know.

Or the one with Indian sportspeople running and that fantastic shot of P.T. Usha running along some deer and Kapil Dev emerging from a tunnel to give the flame to a drenched Sunil Gavaskar.

And remember Narendra Hirwani singing in the first video?? Or that bit where the three heroes- Amitabh, Mithun and someone else (Vinod Khanna I guess ..) sing lustily??

And the Calcutta Metro shot where P. K. Banerjee does that thing with his hair as he is getting off the train...

Johnny Soko and his magic robot. Siddharth Basu quizzes. Those were fantastic.

The theme song for Jungle Book - jungle jungle pata chala hain, chaddi pehen ke phool khila hain.... now that I think about it...it was a trifle fishy eh??

There was Disney cartoon hour on Sundays which I remember watching well past the age for viewing Disney cartoons. Spiderman on Sunday evening ( 5p.m.), also "Hum Panchi ek Daal ke" in weekdays.

There were other TV programs as well...that detective serial in German whose name I can't recall, Oshin (the Japanese story of a young Japanese girl by that name...very stylized but quite moving), the Mohinder Amarnath cricket coaching program that I watched for whatever reasons. But what I remember from that coaching program is an interview with a 16-year-old reedy voiced Sachin Tendulkar talking about his game.

Sports programs on DD. I remember they went off for the news on match point in a French Open final featuring Sergi Bruguera and someone else. God, wasn't Bruguera cute. And that epic French Open final with Michael Chang was interrupted several times by the news.

I remember we used to pray that matches would go on well past news hour when you'd get continuous coverage. The worst bits were when you'd get the action feed from the satellite but not the voice and Anupam Gulati would take over. Or Narottam Puri. Wonder what happened to them.


- Rukawat ke liye khed hain !!!


I remember when the national DD network would switch for the 7 or 7:30 news, any major caption would be shown written on a cardboard and on a good day you could see the shadow of a hand, removing one cardboard and placing the next one before it.

Ads .

My personal favourite for some obscure reason was the Nirma ad with the girl in a lacy frock twirling and then disappearing into the logo. Palmolive da jawab nahin. Amul- a gift for someone you love. I'm Complan boy.. I'm a Complan girl..or was it the other way around?

I was just talking about old ads. Remembered quite a few.

Do you remember -
"Thoda ketchup try karo"
"Ketchup hota kaddu bhara"
"Isme kaddu nahin zara"

But I forgot to mention Tinkle.

Thankfully Ajit's cartoons have survived to this day. (Mona & Sona)

Another thing about DD, which I remember, is the logo with the twirling Pepsi type curves fitting over the central circle. Every morning I used to turn the TV on at around 7 for the news and it would start with the vande mataram and the forming of the logo.

An ad, which I used to find very confusing was some Shilpa bindi "shilpa char chand lagaye".When I was very small used to think it was "shilpa cha cha lagaye" which was weird as to why would chacha put on a bindi.

But my fav sci fi serial was Super Human cyber squad where the kids would enter the comp and fight viruses that looked like mutated dinosaurs

As for the rest of DD - how could u miss Surabhi (renuka & siddharth kak's legendry "namaskar ") and of course chitrahaar and rangoli! And then there was Superhit Muqabla that I used to write countless postcards to every week!

And Rajiv Gandhiââ'¬â"¢s comment I remember most is that he used to start every speech with - 'humein dekhna hai....ââ'¬â"¢

That has to be the best and He-Man!!

Vajradanti vajradanti,vicco vajradanti,
vicco powder, vicco paste,
ayurvedic jaributio se banasampurna swadeshi,
VIIIIIICCCCCCO, VAJRADANTI!!!!
( and a old guy bites in to a RED apple with a CRUNCH! sound)

News for the hearing impaired with that fat woman (Sunday 1.30p.m)

Hey!! It was meri jaan, meri jaan murgi ke ande, the parody of an old Hindi film song from the early ââ'¬Ëoe50s.... aana meri jaan, meri jaan, Sunday ke Sunday, or something like that.

Do you remember when DD metro started and rakhee used to introduce laurel and hardy?

And how can you forget Street Hawk ? ( Street Hawk and Knight Rider.)300 miles per hour!

Then there was Stone Boy, Gayab Aaya, Potli Baba ki Kahaniyaan, Sigma, Phatichar, Panchatrantra (Saturday evening 5:30 p.m.)

And how entirely different that is from kids who never watched those afternoon 'regional' movies and Hindi movies on weekends, Chitrahaar followed by Krishi Darshan.

So boring Hindi movies on weekend, I used to get pissed off with old movies, wait for some new Hindi movie, and used to bunk tuitions for that movie.

The regional language movie on Sunday afternoon with terrible subtitles .hey along with all these programs, do u remeber alif laila.....also we had those two detective kind of serials...reporter (shekar suman) and tehkikaat ....

how can we forget vikram betal...??we also had those national geography shows on sunday at 10am.also we had samander,,,,the title song went something like samunder ki hasi lahero ..........and " Udan .." and dreamt of becoming fighter pilots at one point of time.

The big eyed byomkesh bhakshi ....was never missed.
Nor was the Carrot crunching Karamchand with his assistant Kitty

last but not the least Malgudi days...the title song of this is still fresh..

Hope u had good timing reading it !!!!