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Monday, June 14, 2010

All dressed up and nowhere to go

Hot summer days. Hotter summer nights. Chilly winters. Mayhem-filled monsoons. Indian weather is as unpredictable as the Indian Weather Board is. Every weather season hits us with one question: ‘Can you survive this?’ And no, we cannot, but we try our best, through our seasonal clothes, optional make up, terrain specific shoes etc etc etc. But this is how the normal Indian functions.

Now, our telly soap star actresses, they belong to an entirely different league. They hail from another planet, where the extremity of the weather doesn’t seem to affect them, where sweating is perhaps an abnormality rarely (if at all) visible and where a person’s attire is not in any way related to the weather, the situation or the television serial itself.

So.

Here is a crash course on how one can become the Ultimate Indian Television Soap Queen:
  • Wear make-up. Don’t stop.

  • Wear colourful sarees. With bright motifs and big diamonds. Ask someone to comment on your saree. If they cannot comment due to lack of sight on witnessing your attire, you have draped the right cloth around your lithesome body. Oh, and yes, wear these at home. Going for a party to some fancy hotel? Just top the garishness of what you are already wearing.

  • Wear jewellery. All of it. Make sure no body part goes without a decoration.

  • Wear shoes that defy the texture of every terrain.

  • Change clothes every time the camera moves away from you. Try to top the garishness of every outfit you adorn. It isn’t difficult. Aliens keep donating their discarded skins to the production units every time.

  • Go to bed with the outfit you last wore when the camera swayed twenty times around you. Let the make-up stay. Apply some more just to ensure it stays. Wake up looking like you never went to bed at all, where an invisible iron ensured that the creases stayed out of your garments, and where your hair bears the did-not-let-the-air-touch-my-hair look.

  • Exaggerate every emotion. Mosquito died? Let the tear ducts flow. Dam vessel not making the beloved clinking sound? Murder your mother-in-law’s sister’s husband’s father’s niece’s sister-in-law for the heinous crime of not washing vessels as advised.

  • Plot. Your husband’s family welcomed you, but there is this one evil lady / man in the family who just hates the way your eyelashes curl. Can also not stand the shadow it throws on the bridge of your nose. So both of you begin the game of plotting, where you plot to stay out of all plots, while the evil lady / man just plots to ensure that you are in the middle of every plot.

  • So they made you the vamp huh? Easy. To look like a vamp, just increase the occurrence of things mentioned above, to say, 40 times more. For eg: If the nice lady wears only 10 layers of make-up (Indians love the natural look), you just have to put on 40 more layers (We really love the natural look). Ensure that your eyes have some really charming make up that prompts us to think that you are a cross breed between an ugly doe and a hideous snake. Do not forget to adorn gravity, sensibility and length defying jewellery and bindis. About the acting, well...wait, acting? My bad. Just pretend that you were constipated since you were born. Rest should come naturally to you.
It doesn’t take a lot to star in Indian serials. Our soap stars have the ability to make Osama Bin Laden come out of his hiding place and yell, “Enough of the terror! I give myself up!” The only reason why anyone has not tried this yet is because, well, we really are not THAT merciless now, are we?