‘Sensational above sense’ has emerged as the blueprint for media houses trying to manipulate viewer’s mind in order to get higher Television Rating Point (TRP)- a tool used to know about the popularity of a programme.
Professionalism and media ethics have taken a backseat and aggressive journalism became the primary focus. And we are witnessing the grave outcome of this mayhem with the current cases of TRP fraud.
Back in simpler times, aka, the Doordarshan era, an ambitious arts and cultural television show called Surabhi (The fragrance) set out to discover what diversity actually looked, sounded and felt like. Surabhi was launched as a weekly cultural show at a time when the word ‘viral’ stood just for a nasty fever.
The purpose of the show was to give the Indian audience a flavour of every part of the country they belong to. The result was a superhit show with an astounding run of 11 years and more than 400 episodes. Airing from 1990 to 2001, the show was the visual version of arts and culture magazine. An idea that is way ahead of its time.
Cutting across class, caste and religion, this one of a kind programme, with anchors Siddharth Kak and Renuka Shahne, travelled the length and breadth of the country , exploring everything from music, craft, dance and sculpture to cinema, history, ecology, food and more.
The show successfully aroused the curiosity of its viewers for over a decade and provided an intimate exploration of the country we are conditioned to be proud, but partly familiar with. As one of the hosts said, ‘it gave them reason to be proud of India.”
The fragrance (surabhi) and trajectory of this ‘rainbow’ program across the spectrum enriched our sense of identity and heritage.
It was one of the longest running show of that era on Indian television, one that received both critical as well as commercial acclaim. It might sound ironic to the current times, but there was no marketing strategy behind or viewership targets driving this . And yet the show fetched millions of postcards from the audience on a weekly basis.
According to the Limca Book of Records, the show once received the highest ever documented response in the history of Indian television – over 1.4 million letters in a single week. The Indian postal department was forced to issue a different category of postcards called “Competition Postcards” priced at 2 Rupees each for participating in such contests.
The show even managed to have Amul as its title sponsor. A partnership that lasted for more than ten years and not once did the marketer ask for viewership figures, regional breakup or so on. Those were definitely simpler times, yes. The success of Surabhi is a case study. A study of how hard work and pure intent to serve good content to the audience are enough and everything else fall into place.
