The Saas Bahu Saga – An in-depth Analysis

This project report has been made possible due to the daring effort by a field officer who sacrificed many hours of his life so that us lesser mortals could gather an understanding as to why the ‘K’ serials last for so many lifetimes while generations of humans fade away in –relatively speaking – a blink in ‘K’osmological time :D

Day 1: 2:58 PM

As I made my decision to embark upon this precarious mission, it dawned on me that no amount of preparation could have prepared me for the torture that was to follow in the next 30 minutes (Or was it half of my life!!??? I am still bemused!!).

As the first of my subjects was beginning, I realized that there was no advertisement between the end of one program and the start of the next (I had tuned in a bit early) which is an irony as my studies ahead will show. Most of the soaps begin with a lady guiding the camera around the house (an attempt to welcome the viewer into their humble home which is the first step towards your last step: P).

The serial began and I noticed the innumerable amount of characters it possessed – x grandparents, y great grandparents (At least one is older than 100 years of age), z sons, b daughters, n grand children and of course m enemies trying to ruin the family(What’s a soap without your ‘friendly’ neighbourhood vamp, eh!!) Surprisingly, no pets! (At least that was the case in the subjects of my choice) Maybe Menaka Gandhi put her foot down here! A bloodhound would cower in front of so many people. By the way did I mention that all variables are greater than 5??? And did I mention that there is only 1 servant in the overpopulated household to do the cooking, cleaning and other chores!!?? In these days of scarcity of helpers, cooks, servants etc most of us would kill to have such an efficient servant (I am pretty sure he has a degree in management).

Anyway, when I had finished comprehending the insane amount of characters and was listing down some observations, the first ad showed up. By the time, the insanity resumed, I had finished typing till the current line which goes a long way in describing the length of the advertisement and which also confirms my notion of an irony as mentioned earlier. What followed next was an incessant amount of scheming by the vamp, the schemes being foiled by the lead character (who is always a female- the males somehow never have enough brains for the detective work- Gender discrimination, anyone?) through some insanely brilliant thought work of which Holmes would have been proud of and of course, songs being played in the background -of movies in which the brother of the director has acted and finally, at least 3 or 4 more commercial breaks.

As the clock struck 3:30, the serial abruptly ended leaving the story poised at a “crucial” stage and the next serial started. However I knew I had had enough for today.

Day 2: Same time

My professors had said that I have a good aptitude for logic etc and Calculus and other seemingly tough topics in Math didn’t give me much of a problem. However, the 30 minutes of the saas bahu saga yesterday seemed much more difficult to comprehend than the integrals and differentials of various functions. Hell, theory of relativity would be much easier to understand. The soap started and for what happened next, please refer to the last 21 lines of notes of the previous day. Yes, not much changes except the vamp gets closer to implementing her plan and the female lead gets closer to foiling the same plan. It doesn’t take a genius to guess that the two will meet in the center (Imagine two trains traveling towards each other on the same track) and somehow the female lead will win the “battle”. One more thing I noticed today was the insane amount of money the families possessed. Their deals were always in hundreds of crores and tossing away a few crores like it was petty change (I wish they would give me one of those petty crores), yet none of them figure in the top 400 of the Forbes’ list of rich people. Anyways , that’s the progress I made today.

Day 3 onwards TILL date!!!!

Since the story seemed to progress like a 110 year old tortoise on a marathon, let me fast forward and report to you my findings till date

Observations

1. The breakdown of a normal(as if that word could be used here) 30 minute soap is as follows:

• 15 minutes of advertisements

• 5 minutes of special effects that include the drums in the background and capturing everyone’s reaction (from the grandparents to the family cockroach) which -considering the family population (a miniature China, if you must say)- is a small amount of time

• 5 minutes of the songs being played in the background.

• Finally the story progresses for 5 minutes

2. The families are obviously insanely rich yet the money never seems to be enough

3. The complexity of the serial varies from extremely complex to beyond understanding and I raise a toast to those people who watch these serials everyday as they must possess an extraordinary amount of brain power. I have a nagging feeling that Moore’s law is being upheld mainly because of the above mentioned people.

4. Last but surely not the least , the one reason why soaps maintain an extraordinary amount of duration – When the long drawn story seems to come to a conclusion, Take a generation jump and run the story again in an infinite loop!