KALAIGNAR KILLS MOZHI

It was a launch that was eagerly awaited by the hordes of viewers fed on the staple of filmi stuff – songs, scenes, climaxes, comedy tracks etc. It was a launch that was eagerly awaited by the big soap makers that were intent on cleansing the souls of the million and more viewers of a new channel – now that they were done with basking under the sun. It was a launch that had lined up block busters even before the first switch of the transponder was turned on.

All that hype left me pondering whether the hungama was worth it. For, it turned out no different from the hundreds of channels that line our remote buttons. Feeding on hype, cinema and the ever cleansing detergents – that would be a better word to describe soaps. For, these are only hours that seem to deter gents from watching TV. The line up on day one of Kalaignar TV at least as far as films was concerned was mighty impressive. Mozhi – a slickly made wholesome entertainer and pathbreaking in the sense that it lacked even a semblance of skin show or violence was to be the showpiece in the afternoon. Later, the evening was to feature Imsai Arasan 23rd Pulikesi, a Vadivelu starrer that made no bones that it was a parody on the State of the Nation – opinion polls to that effect be damned.

I was eagerly awaiting my afternoon siesta, when the first strains of Mozhi started flowing into my ears, and I shifted my venue from the bedroom to the living room. What a decision that turned out to be! The unexpected huge hit that Mozhi was really hit hard by a channel that answers to the name of someone who is the protector of language. The movie was itself interspersed in advertisements – only as if to prove that the marketing guys had done a very impressive job selling the channel to the advertisers. It was, though, a very bad advertisement for the channel. Ten or fifteen minutes of advertisements interspersed with almost equal snippets of the film was the norm of the afternoon.

What was even more appalling was the hacking the film was subjected to – entire sequences were chopped off to fit the time slot that was allocated to this film. My daughters who have seen this twice – I have seen this movie only once on the screens, were disappointed by the indiscriminate slaying resorted to in this fashion. I was too, but there was nothing that we could to save Mozhi from murder. It was as insensitive to the viewer as it was to the subject that Mozhi dealt with.

At the end of it all, as the last frame of Mozhi played out, the marketing guys had won – it was one big win going by the way the ad time outstripped the programme time. But the channel lost one pair of eyeballs – and I will anyday trade this channel for a pirated CD – at least that will give me uninterrupted viewing on my terms – not on those of a bigoted programme killer – killing with advertisements.