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The social threat
S. LakshmiSudha
The television has become a major attraction in all the families globally. It is unfortunate that without our knowledge it has become a slow-poison in our life. Violence depicted on television through films/advertisements/serials raises the risk of aggressive behaviour in adults and young viewers and poses a serious threat to society.
Children who watch violent television shows and who identify with the characters and believe they are real are likely to be aggressive as adults. U.S. researchers who studied over 500 children found that the amount of time spent watching television was linked to the severity of obesity as well as the presence of high blood pressure.
A new study suggests children who watched between two and four hours of television a day had a 2.5 times increased risk of high blood pressure than those watching less than two hours a day. Added to it, TV media advertise unhealthy food in an attractive manner. Children get carried away by the material presented in the advertisement, which is mostly junk food. When they consume lots of it, they become obese.
Also excessive television watching reduces the playtime and socialisation. The lack of exercise also contributes to obesity in children, which is found to be increasing in the population. At the same time studies show that girls of adolescent age group are concerned about their weight and many of them wish to look like the models they see on TV who are always thin and tall. Hence they resort to measures like drastic dieting to starving without proper medical guidance resulting in nutritional deficiencies.
Hysterical women and those crying always invariably populate most serials aired on the TV. In the battle for higher television ratings, the last thing that most channels and producers think of is gender consciousness. After all, when the idea is to portray high drama and emotion, who cares about whether women are depicted as over made-up, brainless, or whether there is a needless gory violent scene?
TV serials depict working women very cheap — even lady doctors/nurses are being painted with a villainous hue; the secretaries are portrayed to do anything to attract their married boss; the mother-in-law always plotting to ruin the life of daughter-in-law or daughter-in-law planning to kill her sister-in-law has become very common in all serials.
Signature campaign
One solace is the efforts taken by society to curb these unwieldy things. A signature campaign against the negative portrayal of women in TV serials was launched by Chand Bhatia, a resident of Dandi Swami Road, an acclaimed artist in Ludhiana. Her art pieces depicting empowerment of women and the evil practice of female foeticide have won her recognition and many awards.
“I felt so bad watching scheming women in each serial and wondered what sort of a world I was exposing my daughter to,” said Bhatia in an interview. She was sure that many would join her in this campaign.
Two lots of a thousand signatures each had been sent to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting as well as the Censor Board. Editors of popular women magazines too have made good attempts in discussing this social threat. Unless we have a censor board for the TV, we would be ending up in a ruthless, violent society where school kids killing their own classmates would become a trivial one. Also it is time that we started boycotting these serials — this protest would definitely bring down the ratings and make the directors/producers think of something better.
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