Few days ago a TV journalist called me and asked for my time in order to feature me in one of his television shows. It was in the NTV, a national television established in 2042 BS for the first time in Nepal. The program was related to health and I was to be interviewed about eye health problems in the time of COVID-19. I didn't feel like going. For many reasons. Not only I, many of my friends also instantly rejected the idea as I approached them if they were available for the same.
I clearly remember a day when five of us entered Singha
Durbar (for the first time, of course!) as students participating in a quiz
competition. The school had appointed Shree sir to guide and take us to Singha
Durbar. It was a school level quiz and we won first position. That time, my
brother and I represented Shree Kushadevi Secondary School. We were surprised
to see the lady television presenter making mistakes so many times. She had to
repeat the dialogue for another take, and then another and so on. We realized
this was how TV programs were made.
In Nepal, TV was born the same year as I was. So we have the
same years of history. The charm of TV at that time can't be explained in
words. After about a decade, very few rich people started buying television in
villages. As children, we would flee away from home and walk around two miles
to reach Roshi where we could watch a black-and-white television. It used to be
on Saturdays and our guardians wanted us to take bath as we would have to go to
school on the other six days. After eating the morning meal, we just escaped
the village and queued in Riphelni's tea shop. It was a two-storied house and
we stealthily climbed the ladder and made ourselves seated for five continuous
hours. Unlike other days, Saturdays had day-programs from 12 PM noon starting
from Kids' Program (Bal Karyakram). They also showed a Hindi movie each week
after 2PM. All the children and youngsters would flock around the corners of a
room equipped with a television that time. If you wanted to watch color
television then you had to walk further away.
Even the adults and middle-aged villagers would form a group
at nights and walk across the jungle with lanterns in hand in order to watch
tele-serials like Chakrabyuh or Lalpurja. You see, walking through the forest at night to reach another village that had a
house with a TV. Cheetah and tigers were, not so now, regular jungle dwellers
that time. People like me would die to watch a television show. No one would
ever have fantasized about the chance of appearing themselves on the screen.
What would they do if they knew they could be on the screen? And come today, the
charm of appearing on then-only television screen has faded so tremendously
that even I don't bother to go to the Kathmandu studio. There are dozens of TV
channels now and forgive me if I am wrong but Nepal television is among the
least preferred channels of the public. Why because it should serve as a
mouthpiece of the government oftentimes rendering it biased and it seldom
explores the dynamism in aspects of TV presenters, concepts and new
experiments.
Moreover, if you always have something to tell, then it's high time that you owned your own channel. No big money? Don’t worry you can have a YouTube channel at no cost at all. You no longer have to wait for the opportunities to get yourself featured in any TV channel and besides, if you have fairly good content then your video has an equal capacity to reach to the masses and grasp similar attention. Aadarsha Mishra is one stark example.
I refused to go also because it is not a time of information
scarcity. It just takes your interest to find anything and everything with a
mere click within seconds. What you present on TV is not as precious as before
because chances are the audience might have been already
informed. The Internet is so vastly resourceful that what you want to know is
already there and always. Contrarily but always, what you offer is not new.
That means, if the public wants to know something then they don't lie waiting
for a television show. They delve into the internet to quench their thirst
firsthand. It is only later they encounter such information which would have
already lost the meaning, partially or wholly.
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