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Regional star

Menka Shivdasani

Exciting new things are happening on the regional channel front, but last fortnight proved to be a damp squib -- literally -- for two Marathi channels. The day that saw the worst rain in 50 years in Mumbai -- May 18 -- was also supposed to be a memorable one for Zee Network's Marathi channel, and Rathikant Basu's latest offering. Zee had an event planned to announce two new programmes, and Basu was all set to tell the world about TARA (Television Aimed at Regional Audiences). As it happened, Zee had to cancel, thanks to the heavy rains, and Basu had to wait till the day of the actual launch of the Marathi channel, May 19, for the stars to come alive.

When the launch actually occurred, it was a high-profile event. There were television stars (Neena Gupta and Soni Razdan came in together, Pallavi Joshi was at her smiling best, and a svelte Priya Tendulkar was positively dazzling.) There were al so heads of other TV channels (Kunal Dasgupta of Sony, for instance, who called the evening ``sublime'' and Peter Mukerjea of STAR) and industrialists like Dilip De.

It was the sort of audience that stood up instantly when the national anthem was played -- sung, one line at a time, by several luminaries of the musical world. How Basu managed to get diverse singers together so successfully is a mystery. How he managed to get the two sisters, Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle, whose rivalry is well known, even exchanging smiles while singing together, is a miracle. ``That's my job,'' beamed Basu, when I asked him, though like one senior executive fr om a rival network said, clearly impressed, ``It's like bringing the sun and moon together!'' Zee's approach, whatever the channel, tends to be a mass-based one, aiming at the lowest common denominator at most -- though not all times. Basu and h is team, on the other hand, are talking in terms of classical music and culture, though the TARA channels are also contemporary enough, with news, infotainment, and interactive musical shows.

``No matter where you go in Maharashtra,'' points out Nitin Vaidya, CEO, of the Marathi offering, ``you will observe that these people are always debating about some social or political issue.'' Vaidya, who was earlier Chief of Bureau at Zee News in Mumbai, subsequently played a key role in setting up Zee TV's Alpha Marathi channel.

``We wanted to come up with something original that would reflect the mindset and ethos of the Maharashtrians and that would reflect the culture as it is today,'' he adds.

The channel has also bought exclusive television rights to more than 45 Marathi plays. Theatrical productions such as Ashrunchi Jhali Phule, Baiemaan, To Mi Nevech, Prema Tujha Rang Kasa and Dhol Tashe have been televised for airing on the channel .

TARA is being positioned as a group of channels that will be aimed at a younger audience. ``Seventy per cent of our programming will be interactive, with talk shows, chat shows, road shows and youth-based fun shows,'' says Vaidya. At the same time, there will be social awareness programmes, and four such films, are being shot by award-winning documentary film maker Ravi Deshpande.

The Marathi channel forms part of a digital bouquet, uplinked from Thaicom, that Basu is in the process of launching. After the regional channels are launched in the Indian subcontinent, they will be taken to Indians settled in Australia, Europe and the United States.

Basu's strategy is to base the channels in the appropriate regions so as to draw upon the best of local talent. Gujarati channels in the past, for instance, have always been located in Mumbai, but Basu's Gujarati channel, with danseuse Mallika Sarabhai as its CEO, will be based in Gujarat. The Punjabi channel will be based in Delhi, and the Bangla channel, the first one to be launched recently, is headquartered in Calcutta, with mainstream Bengali producers, actors, director s and scriptwriters from Bengal making programmes for the channel.

Meanwhile, what of Zee's Alpha Marathi? Well, it's reaching out to audiences through two new programmes -- a Marathi version of Zee's popular Sa Re Ga Ma (Tuesdays, 7.30 p.m.) hosted by Mukund Phansalker, and Vyakti Aani Valli (Mondays, 8 p.m.).

Vyakti Aani Valli is based on the stories and characters of P.L. Deshpande, a writer close to the hearts of most Maharashtrians, and when I mentioned it to a few people within the community, they were delighted. The work is directed by Chandrakant Kulkarni of `Bindhast' fame, and acting in the serial are popular TV stars like Laxmikant Berde, Dilip Prabhavalkar, Ashok Saraf and Sudhir Joshi.

It will be interesting to see how the two channels slug it out in the race for television viewers, not just in Marathi, but also in all the other languages. However bloody the battle, Subhash Chandra of Zee has a way of coming out tops, but in this case, he has some pretty serious competition to worry about.

The author can be contacted at menkashivdasani@hotmail.com

Pic.: A still from one of the shows from TARA.