Boom shaka laka
A wall post on Facebook today by an old college friend read like this- “Boom Shaka Laka- I’ve gotten whacked on the head a million times by my mom for watching this!.. Apache Indian !”
I found this very amusing and I was spiraled down a path of nostalgia. I still remember the days when I used to remain glued in front of the CRT Television sets waiting for my favorite TV shows. During my early school days, people had no option to go by the age old adage-“Variety is the spice of life”, for the number of options for television watching was limited or rather it didn’t exist! The presence of the famous Doordarshan channel made life of the ‘common’ man not only ‘spicier’ (compared to the standards then though), but also made it a lot easier (compared to the standards now) because one didn’t have to fight with anybody for the remote and yes the fingers were spared from the constant need for application of pressure.
And so did Doordarshan ‘spice’ up my life too. The spiciest of all programs on DD was the weekend late night pop music show. You have no idea as to how much I used to look forward to this program. This used to greatly excite me and every weekend I would want to watch ‘Apache Indian’s Boom shaka Laka’ at any cost. Oh Boy! I was quiet a fan of his then. The ubiquitous Usha Uthup was the other ‘pop sensation’ who ‘dazzled’ the Indian Audience before the ‘Baby Doll’ stormed the Indian pop scene with ‘Made in India’ and set an altogether new trend and brought ‘life’ in that industry. But for her times, I feel Usha Uthup was quiet different and ‘modern’, singing songs in westernized ways in a sort of a male voice, much against the popular norm. Yes, one could say she was a big name in the pop scene of India at one point of time. But I wonder how the gen X today, would have reacted to a female pop singer in a sari + huge bindi + tonnes of bangles and no skin show!!!! Hmmm….;-)
Some of the other programs I remember watching without fail as a child were the Ramayana and the Mahabharata series. Ah, how sad we siblings used to get if we missed it! The other favorites’ were the cartoons and the children’s shows like He-Man, Sigma and Malgudi Days.
Mr Yogi and Jaspal Bhatti’s Show were some of the Hindi programs I remember for the sheer joy of watching the actors doing funny things on TV and not exactly for the funny dialogues though, because I being from a non-Hindi speaking part of the country, my command in the language was less. And the Hindi lessons in school were also not of much help. 
Being the only sister of two rumbustious brothers, I also had to put up with action serials like ‘The Knight Rider’ and ‘The Street Hawk’. How can anyone watch a serial like that? Only men have the answer to that!! Looking back I feel I could have done a lot more productive things in life rather than having to brave through the boring car stunts of our good ol ‘Baywatch Daddy’ in his tight skin hugging joker pants! But having being in a single digit figure of age, time and laziness was in plenty and yes less of regrets!
Life was so much simplified during those days. Looking back at how things have transformed over the years with respect to technology (DD->Cable TV->DTH) and the content (Recorded, less flashy content -> Real time, bold(A) content), one is amazed(at the former)/amazed+ shocked(at the latter) and is left to wonder- “What does the future have in the offering?”
