Over the past two decades I've watched countless hours of TV, starting with watching Ruturaagalu and Antarangalu with mom and then graduating to the Balaji Telefilms School of Twisted Relationships which produced Pavitra Bandham and then moving on to Ballika Vadhu and Uttaran. Once the Telugu/Tamil dubbed/Hindi TV soaps were done I graduated a healthy dose of American TV shows through Friends and Breaking Bad and I've forgotten the number of TV shows I've watched since. If you ask me to summarize the TV shows I watched in the past year, I could at most talk about one or two shows but I am certain I've watched more than 20 shows during this period. The plots and character arcs of these shows all blend into each other and form a wordless thought mass that plopping off the corner of my brain somewhere.

Idle watching TV has its benefits, I don't have to pay attention to the horrible atrocities happening across the world , nor do I have to pay attention to the parts of my life that need tending. It's a kind of personal unwinding where one forgets that existence of oneself and outsources the processing of emotions to the recurring characters on screen. These days this connection also ceases to exist, dulled from the daily dose of capitalism the brain can no longer remember the names or follow plots – there's an occasional flash of a scene that demands attention but that too is forgotten in an instant. When people talk about specific shows or make a reference to them, my brain gets excited for a microsecond at the vague recognition but instantly falls back into the confusion of forgetfulness.

I don't know what this kind of viewing does to one's brain but information overload cannot certainly be good. The fact that background chatter is needed to maintain personal calm would seem strange just a century ago. Cutting down on TV increased my will to learn new things considerably, having replaced that time with books, movies and video lectures that help me go through a topic in-depth than laterally.

This doesn't mean that I'd stop watching shows altogether but just the ones that are made “binge worthy” aka addictive by default. Doing a first watch of Columbo and the shows feels far more deliberate with an intent to matter, which is the kind of media I want to entertain my time with.

#TV #streaming