Famous Recipes: How to cook a Daily Soap Opera

Ingredients:

• Good looking actors - with poor acting skills
• A very short story based on a very poorly-developed idea
• Expert makeup artist
• Stuntman turned cameraman
• A good fashion designer - to design fancy clothes for all actors to wear onscreen
• A really big house with lot of rooms
• A really big family
• and lots and lots of glycerine.

Preparation:

1. Take some sos - i.e. same-old-story. Beat and knead the dough of your story so much that it becomes as soft and stretchable as chewing-gum. This will ensure that you can stretch the programme as much as you like.
2. Add to it a bunch of assorted good, evil and neutral characters. Stir them well through out the story.
3. Use an expert makeup artist to garnish your charaters with drop dead good looks.
4. With the help of a good fashion designer, add appropriate dressing for your characters. The dressing should be in accordance with latest fashion for the main characters, and it should be fancy-dress-style traditional dressing for the other side characters ("fancy-dress-like" because nobody really dresses up that traditionally in real life now-a-days).
5. Stick the characters together on grill-sticks to make them a part of a really big family. Encase them within the wrapping of an impossibly big house with lots of rooms.
6. Put some tadka of jealousy, passion and wealth to the overall preparation.
7. Add lots of masala. The more the masala, the better.
8. Add ample quantities of glycerin to moisten each episode and make it nicely mushy.
9. Garnish your preparation with a huge dollop of the element of surprise.
10. Sprinkle some crystals of comedy if required.
11. Add salt of realism to taste.
12. Keep the preparation to boil over the heat of Love, hate, tragedy and family values.
13. Allow the preparation to simmer for a while over advertisements.
14. Decorate your dish with skilled camera-craftsmanship (example zooming in on actor's faces, panning the camera across an actor's face from all possible directions, etc.)
15. Now chop up the story base thus formed in really small pieces. Call each such piece an episode.
16. Serve each episode over TV channel during dinner time between generous helpings of Advertisements.

Best serves: All the women-folk in the family, and some men-folk too...

Appendix A: How to select your characters.
Remember your characters should always be in black and white. Either they should be doodh-se-dhule good or daal-se-kaale bad. Any real-life characters with unique shades of grey won't do.

Your daily soap should contain the following essential characters:
1> The central character - around whom the entire story revolves. This should mandatorily be a woman. She should be drop-dead-georgeous. If she is not, use the skills of your expert makup artist. Acting skills should not exceed the limit of 2.5 out of 10. She should appear atleast once in every episode (this is mandatory especially if the programme is named after her).
2> The hero - who is obviously in love with the central charater and vice-versa (somewhere down the line). Hero should not have - repeat - should NOT have ANY acting skills. Hero should be - this is very important - SHOULD be very handsome and good looking.
3> A Saas - According to the original recipe, saas was a necessary ingerdient. But if your story demands an absence of saas, then ensure that you mention it clearly in the title of the programme - eg. saas bina sasural.
4> A villian - any gender will do. But ladies preferred over men (the target audience - both men and women - will identify with this). Unlike real-life, Villian should be very devious-minded and evil to the core.
5> Relatives - Relatives are genenrally supposed to be neutral. They may bend towards or against the central character's good side depending on the mood of the director on that day.

Donot hesitate to introduce new characters into your story every now and then, other-wise your story will soon come to an end.. Remember, the most important criteria for a successful and famouns soap opera is how much longer it can run with more episodes and more seasons, than the original story would have ever allowed.

Appendix B: The element of Surprise: Surprisingly Garnishing :-P ...
The element of Surprise: Sprinkle some surprise in every episode. The surprise need not be surprising, just a same old twist in the same old tale will do. Take the help of Fate and God for this purpose.

Fate: Fate will play an important role in every episode. Use fate to ensure that something bad will happen to the central character or her side-kicks (like her lover / husband / close family) in every episode.

God / Goddess: Take God's help whenever required in the story. Unlike real-life, wherever fate creates problems for the central character, then God will always come to their rescue.

Appendix C: The Tragedy of Comedy
How to make your audience laugh: During a (supposedly) comic sequence, just add background laughter sound. This will let the audience know that this part was supposed to be a funny and that they are supposed to laugh. Now-a-days one need not have genuinely witty dialogs or originally comic situations to make people laugh. A much-re-used old joke, a genuine PJ or a piece of ridiculously over-done acting is sufficient to make now-a-days-audience laugh...

Appendix D: The Don'ts
Always avoid any real-life situation or character-sketches. If it was supposed to show real-life drama, then your programme would have been a documentary, not a daily soap opera. Practical and plausible situations have no place in a soap opera - in the same way as they have no place in the minds of story writers, directors as well as the target audience who make such programmes a hit and a success.

Chicken Run

This happened a few weeks back.
It was a Sunday.
I was at the chicken shop.
It was a bit crowded and I was awaiting my turn to select a hen.
The person in front of me had selected his hen. The hen-picker, Mr Mulla, weighed it and proceeded to tag it with a number. The number on the small plastic token was not clearly printed. He showed it to the customer and asked "what is this? Is it 39?". The customer looked at the token closely. I, being my usual inquisitive self, peeked over the customer's shoulder to look at the number. It was definitely 39.
Mulla hollered the number and the weight of the hen to the cashier-cum-owner, who promptly wrote out a bill to the customer with the token number mentioned on it.
I went through the same process, paid for my chicken, collected the bill and moved out to buy some other food-stuff. Most people do the same since it takes some time before the chicken is ready to be cut.
The hen, once tagged is passed at the back of the shop to be killed and cleaned up. After killing the hen and removing its skin, feathers and innards, the body is passed on with the tagged number to the butcher at the front. The butcher calls out the number, cuts up the chicken and hands it over to the customer.
After a while I returned to the chicken shop and awaited my number to be called out. The man who had been in front of me, the one whose number was 39, was waiting too.
After a while Mr 39 approaches the butcher and asks "O Bhai, 39 aaya kya zara dekho na?" ("Please see if No 39 has come or not?")
Butcher asked the person at the back who cleans the chicken: "Aye Paatill, 39 hai kya dekh zara? Zara jaldi mein bhej de" ("Patil, see if 39 number chicken is there? Process it first...") and then back to the customer he says "Aaa jayega" ("wait a while, it will come")
Mr 39 retreated to wait further.

After a while, 39 number had not yet come. So Mr 39 approached the owner of the shop.
Mr 39: "Are bhai, ye mera 39 number chicken abhi tak nahi aaya. Maine do baar poocha. Zara dekhne ko bolo..." ("I asked the butcher 2 times, yet my chicken No. 39 has not yet come to him. Please check")
Owner, in a gruff authoritative voice: "Aye Paatil, Salim, zara dekh 39 number kidhar hai? Dekh zara, jaldi bhej..." (Patil, Salim, see where is No. 39... find it and send it quickly)
Boss is after all boss.
At the owner's command, both the butcher and the cleaner began inspecting the numbers of the chickens which were ready to be cut...
Butcher says: "22... 35... 16... 19... Kya number bola? 19??" ("22... 35... 16... 19... What was the number - 19??)
Customer: "No no... its 39..."
Butcher checks again and then says: "39 nahi 19 hoga" (May be its not 39. its probably 19)
Customer: "Nahi maine to check kiya..." ("No no, I had checked...")
Butcher, without listening to the customer: "Aap ka 19 hi hoga. Woh Mulla paagal hai. Use dikhai nahi deta..." (It must be 19. That Mulla, he doesn't see properly...)
And then to the owner he says: "Oh maalik, ye 39 wale ko 19 de raha hoon..." (disclaimer to the owner: "boss am giving 19 number chicken to no. 39")
I looked at the the owner. He sat there looking ahead with no expression on his face. I knew he had heard it. But his face said "No Comments".

The poor fellow Mr 39... All he managed to blurt was a few "buts" which went unheard and/or unheeded. The butcher cut up the No. 19 chicken and handed it over to Mr. 39. He accepted it meekly and went away. After all, who could blame him? It was obvious that No. 39 chicken was lost or misplaced or given away to someone else. There was no point wasting time in searching for it or getting another chicken which weighed almost the same.

My chicken had not yet arrived at the butcher's table.
After a while, another guy walks in, shows his bill to the butcher and asks "Mera 19 number aaya kya re?" (Please check if my no. 19 chicken has come or not?)
The butcher looks at the owner and says: "Saab, unnis number aa gaya..." ("Boss No. 19 customer has arrived")
The butcher waits for an answer. All he gets is a stern "No Comments" expression from the owner.
The customer sees this silent exchange between boss and butcher and jokingly asks "Kya hua? Mera chicken kahi udd to nahi gaya??" (What happened? Did my chicken fly away or what?)
The cleaning guy at the back calls out: "Are nahi, uska to parr nikal diya tha, udega kaise... chal ke gaya rahe ga" (No no, I had removed its feathers, couldn't have flown... must have walked out instead...)
The men at the back laugh. The butcher tries to hide his smile.
The owner steps in (finally) and says: "Are nahi, aaj zara gardi hai... aa jayega..." (No no, its a bit crowded today... wait a while, it will come...)
Instead of waiting the man walked out.

My chicken came, I got it cut and as I was about to walk out, the butcher called out... "Number 39..."
He says to the owner, "Saab, Number 39..."
The butcher holds up the No. 39 chicken and looks at the owner.
All he gets as an answer is a stern "No Comments" expression...