Soap

There's a scathing, funny article on Indian (in this case Hindi) TV serials in yesterday's The Hindu newspaper. I've added the notes in italics (and the asterisks are because ever since I posted this I've been getting too many Google referrals for episode guides!):

THE GHAR-ghar-ki-sabun-ki-kahani (Ghar Ghar ki kahani, the Story of Every House, is a popular serial. The addition of sabun, 'soap,' makes it The Soap Opera of Every House.), on national television touched breathtakingly new lows recently. ...

In "K*k*u*s*u*m" (The extra 'k' in K*k*u*s*u*m has been inserted by the producers for numeralogical purposes - to make sure it gets good ratings.), K*k*u*s*u*m's Akhanda Sowbhagyawatiness (See below for explanation) was reinstated by her remarrying Abhay. For the disbelievers amongst us who have not kept abreast with matters of such import, Abhay is K*k*u*s*u*m's first husband - a rich, spoilt boy with eyelashes more luscious than Miss Piggy's - who marries K*k*u*s*u*m only because his horoscope ordains that he will die young and horribly and can only be saved if he is wedded to an Akhanda Sowbhagyawati.

If you don't know what an Akhanda Sowbhagyawati is, you deserve to be drummed out of the Akhil Bharatiya Couch Potatoes Parivar... (The All India Couch Potatoes League)

Now K*k*u*s*u*m is your average middle (mid-dull) class, pavitra-as-driven-paneer (pure-as-driven-white cheese) Miss Goody Two Shoes whose Rin-Ki-Safedi (clean as though washed in Rin soap) character and cloying saccharine sweetness is only less excruciating than her clothes.

Naturally, she is also Miss Akhanda Sowbhagyawati. To cut a 432-episode story short, Abhay treats K*k*u*s*u*m worse than a doormat and she retaliates by marrying the man who was engaged to Abhay's niece. The man, many weary episodes later dies, but not before smearing her mang lavishly with his khoon! (smearing the parting of her hair with his blood: in some parts of India, married women put red powder there.)

How can an Akhanda Sowbhagyawati become a widow? A question that has raged like a forest fire in millions of drawing rooms across the land. Of course she can't.

So to sort that out, Abhay - who has meanwhile married K*k*u*s*u*m's second husband's `bad bitchy' chachi (father's brother's wife) - now gets an incurable tumour in his brain which is great for everyone around because K*k*u*s*u*m can now remarry, ostensibly only to save Abhay's life but actually to preserve her Akhanda Sowbhagyawatiness. ...(more)

Akhanda Sowbhagyawati: In Gujarat, and apparently other parts of the North, married women are addressed in letters as A. Sow. (your name here) -- the unflattering-looking abbreviation of Akhanda Sowbhagyawati, which means something like 'endlessly auspicious.' If a woman is widowed she is henceforward addressed as Ga.Swa. (name) - short for Ganga Swaroop: 'having the form of Ganga', the goddess who is the Ganges River, who has no husband. In the TV serial K*k*u*s*u*m (I haven't seen it, but the ads for it are bad enough), I assume that her horoscope says that she will never be widowed; she will always be Akhanda Sowbhagyawati.

So, this is the stuff which is popular on TV these days.