The Real Village

The absence of a television in my home as caused me to realize how easy it is to live life without the constant static and electronic voices of people who want to be recognized. I don't have to deal with useless commercials that disrupt the pattern of a show every five minutes. It is easy to enjoy the television when it allows itself to be enjoyable. However, with useless ads and unnecessary programs, the watching of television has become much less enjoyable and far beyond unnecessary. For the women of India, the watching of programs, like soap operas, has proved only to change small opinions of living standards and ideas, but not made it a good thing.

The “traditional” attitudes about and towards women have not been particularly turned around because of the bringing of cable to more rural areas as the article states. The new shows often show stories of the wealthy, “well-educated” working “outside the home,” and controlling “their own money.” The shows most often watched portray young women going against their parents, who are very traditional; the father being over-commanding, the mother doing nothing but cooking and cleaning, the son being made to go into an engineering or doctoring profession, and the girl studying to become a law student.

Then the plot “thickens.” The daughter falls in love with someone her parent disapprove of, the parents have long meetings, and then the daughter is forbidden to see the guy she has fallen in love with, then usually runs away with him.

The fact is, with famous shows like this shown across India on cable, the attitudes towards women have no reason to change, and don't. On weekly visits to villages about an hours walk from my home town and sometimes longer, I see plenty of televisions sets in small, mud-built houses. These televisions are usually set to the soap operas, with members of the family sitting on a bed with eyes glued to the screen. The mother is most often cleaning the house, washing dishes, or preparing food.

The women nowadays do not need the extreme permission from their husbands. The people who do need permission to shop, or visit friends. In fact, in the villages around Mussoorie, a small town on a hilltop, the expectation is very unlike what is explained in the article. Women freely visit., however they do not shop. The villages around here are built around Mussoorie, making it the only place to shop. The men are the ones who go out and buy the supplies needed from the home. The woman finishes her chores, then is free to visit the surrounding people. Probably a partial reason for women being free to visit in these villages is the small community. Often villages have only four or five families, so the families feel very safe with being around each other. With the men doing all the work, it is almost unnecessary for the women to want to go any further from the community.

All in all, the television shows make no difference to the lives of women in rural India. It serves only for entertainment purposes.