zee business live tv There’s been a terrible misunderstanding. Or if you have to be perfectly honest, there’s been a total cock-up. For all those folks whose mouths are going dry thinking about what will happen to this country after a yoga instructor has done to the UPA government what Raj Babbar did to Zeenat Aman in < related storiesWrangling continues, Ramdev won’t end fastPolice cancel yoga camp, Baba asked to stay out of Delhi EM>Insaf ka Tarazu, my advice: sit back and enjoy the show. It’ll last a few more days and then we’ll all go back to our respective foxholes. So what makes me think that the whole Ramdev business is a Mount Kailash made out of a pimple and that this silly government has overreacted in giving the yoga instructor so much importance? As an amateur anthropologist with a TV remote control.
I have ventured forth many times into the zone known as ‘devotional channels’. This is where I first encountered rather spiffy telecasts of bhajan sandhyas, Ram kathas, kirtans, aartis and religious discourses. This is also where I first met characters such as Swami Ramsukhdasji, Avdeshanandji Maharaj, Munishri Tarun Sagarji and Yogrishi Swami Ramdevji. It isn’t the religious bits that makes me go to these channels. What interests me is the parallel universe of mofussil culture and entertainment they contain. This is another chunk of the Real India, inhabited by people better off than the one always cited by the usual critics of neo-liberalism, and yet a more familiar version of Real India than the one we only get to read about. While the media seem to have become besotted with their discovery of a yogi taking on the ‘secular’ world of nation-running, the fact is that these ‘devotional’ gatherings, many of them tailored for back-to-back TV programming, have never refrained from venturing into the world of ‘forgotten values’, ‘western influences’ and ‘rotten politicians’. It’s not only Geet Govind and bhakti ras dharas that we hear here.
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