DesiDabba - Boss, Thoda Sa Roomani Ho Jaye

I was trolling around the TV serials after 10:30, and I came across this strange looking serial on Zee TV. It was based around a village, and seemed to have a village bumkin and a smartly dressed girl. Seems interesting .. so much different from the saas bahu kind of serials; and it was interesting, to some extent. Started on April 24, 2006, it appers on Zee TV.

The serial is about a rich girl, Aanya (Priya Badlani) whose family is rich, and she is like any other rich spoiled girl, somewhat of a brat, brash, imperious, sorrounded by luxury. She seems like having it all. However, a turn of fate takes away all this, and she has to go and live in a village. You can imagine the reaction - a city girl in a village. She can’t stand the strange ways, and boy, do they consider her strange. Her dressing is so different from the village style, she behaves in ways that are normal to her but are considered so different by the villagers, and maybe they even consider her somewhat more forward than how village belles are supposed to behave.

Then she meets Raghu (Sudeep Sahir), a boy of the village, and they fall in love (well that’s how the ads used to put it); but it isn’t so simple. He is still a villager, and if I use the term used by city people, something of a bumkin. He works in the fields, dresses as a villager would, and so on. They run into each other a few times, with no obvious reaction.

And this is where it turns corny (or rather, the serial starts to gain strenght), they start to fall for each other over a period of time. His mother is a nice cooperative lady, and she does not do anything against this. However, this is a serial, and you cannot not have evil or somewhat bad characters in the serial, or else the serial will end very fast. So, you have Raghu’s dadi coming into the picture suddenly, an imperious lady who does not quite appreciate her grandson contemplating marriage with a shahar ki mem.

She tries a lot of things, such as getting in another girl who is more to her taste, and arranging for some crazy competition between the 2 girls to see who can be a better bahu. In addition, there is another comic couple of a town girl and a village lad which is pretty much atrocious.
At this point, the serial started quickly going downhill, and now seems like a forced twist and turn in the story. They are married in the serial now, and are making up some story as they move along.

And somehow I end up blaming the Balaji telefilms for all such things, they are the ones who make their serials go on and on by twists in the story, generation time leaps, and so on; and everybody wants to follow in their footsteps. Would it not be good to be able to terminate a serial on time before it starts to turn stale, and you hit the channel change button as soon as the serial starts to come on ?