Oh. My. Gods. Y’all.
India is a place where there are many different religions and gods to choose from. Travel along a mountain road, a village street, a city alleyway, and there will be a small gate or house-like structure where some deity is assumed to have taken up residence. Similarly, Indian TV offers the entire spectrum of religious belief, mostly in the form of televised services for Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Buddhists, broadcast live morning and evening.
[Editrix’s note: yep, another blog entry that seemingly has nothing to do with the adventures of the MommyWizards. About the time of the last blog entry, I realized that Joy was actually doing a much better job of describing our day-to-day life in Tso Pema than I could, and it would only be a duplication of effort to do it again. So, in a mode similar to my blog entries about San Miguel, Mexico, this blog will tend to cover more general observations about life in India, while Joy’s will cover stuff actually happening to us. For those of you following along on the medical front, shortly after all of us got our digestive tracts a bit more in order, and got ourselves properly rehydrated, a nasty cold that loads up the lungs with goopy stuff started making the rounds. Okay, enough of that. Back to the blog entry, in progress….]
Stateside, most religious TV consists of this Christian Bible thumper or that delivering their take on What God Thinks About All This. Not so with Indian TV, where religious services are just as likely to consist of chanting, dancing, and artwork presentation as well as the usual sermon-plus-a-song. After a while the Christian stuff begins to look a little boring.
And then there’s this one show called Shree Ganesh. Watch a couple episodes of that, and the Christian stuff begins to look really boring.
I can’t imagine a more efficient way to marry job security and religious observance than creating a television show around the Bhagavad Gita. The “Gita” consists of thousands of stories about the doings of Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna, Kali, Parvati, Hanuman, and many other deities. To retell it as a one-hour TV show basically means not having to make any trips to the Unemployment Office for oh, about a few hundred years. What’s more, Shree Ganesh is not just a simple retelling of the Bhagavad Gita, but a dramatic recreation of the better-known stories, complete with the “Bollywood ishtyle” pauses for song and dance routines or cinematic fight scenes.
I just think of it as the “soap opera of the gods.” In “Shree Ganesh”, the gods are just like you and me, except for, of course, the crazy mad skillz and serious bling. Every episode Shree Ganesh himself puts in an appearance to straighten everybody out and hand out the very occasional pimp slap to the current main bad guy.
Until I started watching Shree Ganesh, it never occurred to me that a religious show would ever need a choreographer and a fight director, but I now believe that these things are absolute necessities, in the same way that maybe a COGIC church congregation absolutely requires a good piano player and a choral lead who can carry a tune. And it’s not like the same thing couldn’t be accomplished with the Bible. The Old Testament, especially, is chock full of stories of peace, loyalty, betayal, belief, greed, jealousy, war, romance, miracles…
Why not a “Mr. God” TV show? A little fight choreography by Yuen Wo-Ping, a bit of song and dance from Andrew Lloyd Weber, maybe some direction from George Lucas, and we’re basically there….
