kissa TV kiss ka

Trust Ekta Kapoor to line up a blitz of such shrewd marketing that you would believe that she is going to start a trend of kissing on Indian television. While bikinis and choreographed bathing sequences have made their debut, thanks to reality shows, we are being made to believe by a city tabloid that the kissing sequences are going to be a television first thanks to Ekta Kapoor and Co's all-pervasive marketing arm that has all television reporters by their throat.The paper has over the past carried two articles on how youngsters who arrived to audition for Balaji teleserials were suddenly asked to kiss the person next to them, in most cases complete strangers. The article despite being cleverly packaged as a negative one by the paper did not do enough to keep the reader from seeing the shrewd Balaji marketing gimmick behind the whole affair.Coming back to the point, kissing isn’t new to Indian television. If it begins again, Ekta wouldn’t be the pioneer however much her marketing team might want us to believe.That credit should probably go to the team at Zee TV that brought in the first Indian cable television network in around 1993 if I’m not mistaken.That would be the Sharad Sharan-directed Dillagi, a serial that notched up another first by being entirely woven around the characters and locales of the city’s oldest theme park- the Subhash Chandra-promoted Esselworld at Gorai,The serial had a long kissing sequence between Neena Gupta and the late Dilip Dhavan.Infact the first kiss controversy on television might also be the one involving the Zee TV serial Kurukshetra, directed by Lekh Tandon.India Today on its last page carried a snippet with a mug of Seema Kapoor that Indian television viewers would be in for what the magazine claimed would be the longest kiss in Indian TV history when the protagonists in the serial- Harsh Chayya and Seema Kapoor- would finally admit to their feelings for each other and seal it with a 'caution thrown to the winds' kiss..The audience waited with customary eagerness only to be cheated with a kiss sequence that got canned with some suggestive camera-angles like the way directors in the 60s and 70s managed thanks to tough censorhsip. In short it was a scene which could have been shot even if both the actors were corridors apart, forget rooms.Aware of the bad press, Lekh Tandon made amends and gave the audience an authentic kiss in the same serial, this time between Harsh Chayya and Shefali Shah who were part of another parallel love track in the serial. The fact that Shefali Shah was at that time Shefali Chayya and Harsh's real life wife helped.The channel once again gave Indian television its first adult serial - definitely a departure from the staid ones offered by Doordarshan- when it telecast 'Shaadi Ya' directed by Aruna Raje.It had several television stars make their debut and featured issues dealing with low libido to marital rape and had some of the first scenes of couples in bed, in embrace and stealing smooches. Among those on whom these 'role in the bed' scenes were shot was Himani Shivpuri.Of course a good dose of complacency that came with an unchallenged run for nearly five years killed the channel and soon Star Plus took the lead and, though I have not followed TV much of late, seems to have kept it. Prime movers in the Star Plus armada were Amitabh Bachchan and of course the lady who brought marketing into the TV serial world- Ekta Kapoor.