She’s Always On

The setting is an ordinary indian drawing room with carved furniture and prints on the walls, as classic a middle-class interior as Ozzie and Harriet’s was for America in the 1960s. “Thank God you’re back,” sighs the neighborhood washerwoman. “Your mother-in-law is so ill-tempered, I was going to quit.” Privati, the glue of this ordinary family with their very ordinary problems, smiles understandingly. “Don’t feel bad,” she advises. “She is good at heart, but when people get upset they say bad things.”

“Cut!” shouts the director. The lights fade, grips start pulling down reflectors and the two actresses wander off to literally powder their noses. Another scene from Kahaani Ghar Ghar Ki (The Story of Every Home), one of the biggest soaps on Indian television, is complete and, more importantly, so is another installment in a set of video lives that have enthralled millions of Indians. Four floors below, in the basement of a brand new building in the suburbs of Bombay, 20 people are jostling to shoot scenes for another very familiar sort of soap opera, Kyunki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (Because Mother-in-Law Was a Daughter-in-Law Once). All told, five television series are filmed at Balaji House, a soap-opera factory that last year produced nearly 1,500 hours of television programming and intends to do 25% more in the coming yearas long as the great Indian masses keep tuning in.

The “factory” is owned by the Kapoor family. But the dreams pouring forth over the airwaves are from a single Kapoor, Ekta, an unmarried writer who has melded the Harlequin-style pulp romance novels and sentimental Hindi films she loved as a lonely child with the very adult business of television. As a result, Ekta, 26, has become the subcontinental equivalent of David E. Kelley, creator-writer of Picket Fences and Ally McBeal. Kyunki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi is the number-one rated show in India, ahead of the local version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? “We are the biggest,” gloats Sanjay Dosi, CEO of Balaji Telefilms. “We are producing double that of our nearest competitor.”

That is because the competition does not have Ekta, whose precise measure of the pulse of the Indian marketin particular, the so-called petticoat brigade of middle-class housewiveshas led to the creation of a distinctly imagined video world. Some of Kapoor’s serials are shown during the day, others at night; but all revolve around the same theme: a selfless woman who copes with difficult relatives while anchoring the joint marital family. When Ekta killed off a character in Kyunki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi earlier this yearhe was a model Indian sonviewers were aghast and it made headlines in the national dailies. “I sell dreams with spurts of reality,” explains Ekta. “It makes people believe in my stories.”

Or at least follow them with hankie-grabbing devotion. As a result, television channels are eager to run anything she offers at just about any price. But Ekta’s own story has a touch of Cinderella, the kind of magical twist she would never allow in her lace-curtain tales. Born into a Bombay movie familyfather Jeetendra was a successful film actor, mother Shobha was a homemakerEkta’s childhood was materially easy but emotionally difficult. She was obese, lonely, and she buried herself in romance novels, food and a secret fantasy life. “Half the time I am in another world in my head,” she says. She did poorly at school, not completing college, much to her mother’s despair. “We pampered her and let her be a child,” recalls Shobha, who now acts as managing director of the production company, “but I knew she would do something because she was street smart.”

At 17 and just a little more than 1.5 m tall, Ekta weighed over 80 kg. “My favorite dream,” she laughs, “was that I had lots of money so I could build a chocolate house like the one in Hansel and Gretel and then eat it up in a month.” But at 19 she decided to change. She went on a diet and dreamed of marriage. “I was never ambitious,” she says. “I don’t know what happened to me.”

What happened was that her father decided to invest in television, which cable revolutionized in the early 1990s. After several years of struggle, Shobha started a production facility in the 280 sq m basement of the family bungalow. When Ekta, the sulky daughter, came up with a lively story idea, the family was amazed. “I decided to give her a chance,” says Shobha. Mano Ya Na Mano (Believe It or Not), made in 1994, was Balaji’s first success, followed by an even more fabulous response to Hum Paanch (We Five).

Since then, Ekta hasn’t looked back. Her accomplishments have brought her a new world of confidence, and a whole lot of ego to go with it.

She’s now the Queen of Indian Televisionand acts it. Ekta loves hip clothes and Bombay’s dazzling nightclubs, where she can be seen at least once a week, if she can get away from work. On the set, she can be the engaging collaborator who laughs and claps because she is thrilled with a costume, or, in an instant into a raging boss who can rattle an office of 200 co-workers. She works 18-hour days but can scarcely keep an appointment. She loves creating characters and situations, spinning stories, but doesn’t have the discipline to sit down and write scripts. “I am a Gemini, you see,” she explains candidly. “I have a split personality.”

There’s a split too between Ekta’s modern Indian world of television, her late nights at clubs and some older idea of India. The Kapoors’ company, for example, was named after their family deity, Balaji. There’s a marble temple inside the gate of the six-story office at which everyoneemployees includedstops for a brief prayer before going to work. On screen, it’s that combination of the contemporary and the traditionalwith emphasis on the latterthat makes her plots so popular: viewers identify with the main characterthe good womanand root for her to triumph over evil relatives and women conniving to steal her husband. “Indian society was always about joint families and we are trying to say we can still make it happen,” explains Suraj Rao, the director of Kyunki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi.

In Ekta’s dramas, the kinder, gentler ways of India’s past live on, and people want to replicate them. Sales of holy tulsi plants, worshipped by the women of the house, have shot up ever since they started appearing on Ekta’s soaps. The kind of retro clothes and furnishings featured on the shows are all the rage. “Balaji is brilliant in what it does,” says Barnali Shukla, a Bombay scriptwriter, “but these serials are making women regress by 200 years.”

An exaggeration, perhaps, and untrue about at least one Indian woman: Ekta herself. At Balaji, work slows down until a Kapoor family member shows up, and things get positively whirlwind when it’s Ekta who arrives. Minions trail after her pleading for approvals on costumes, make-up, sets and scripts. She calls some people into her office, a virtual museum of Hindu gods, barks into phones and tunes out every so often to message her friends on the mobile. Staff hover waiting for her attention, but for many it could take all day until she is ready to see them. Ekta often ends up asleep on the couch in her office in between meetings. “She is pushing herself too hard,” says her mother. “But she has reached a place and now she wants to stay there.”

Meanwhile, Ekta is chewing out an assistant for messing up appointments, a muddle that could probably be blamed on Ekta herself, which no one dares point out. “I try to please everyone and then I can’t do anything,” she explains, sounding like a good mother from one of her serials. Then she turns her attention back to the errant assistant. “Chill, man, just get it right next time,” she instructs. Easy words for someone who, these days, is getting it right every time.