Hollywood may close up shop and go into vacation mode around Thanksgiving time every year, but in other parts of the world (in this case India) TV execs eyes remained riveted to the ball:
by Divya Kaushik
Purnendu Shekhar feels that to be a successful writer for television one needs to understand relationships and their complexities, the working and business of channels and the art of interweaving several stories smartly. He tells Divya Kaushik that the audience should also be blamed for the success of low grade content on the small screen
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works. Virginia Woolf must have been speaking on behalf of every writer when she wrote this famous line. Purnendu Shekhar can’t agree more on this. The script writer strongly feels that to weave a beautiful story it is important for a writer to connect with it personally. Each of his stories is born out of his experience and observations. He gives an example and says that the story of famous show Balika Vadhu that made him a household name was partly based on the experiences of his mother, who herself was married at the age of 15 in Rajasthan. “In fact, in the second episode of Balika Vadhu the lead (Anandi), who is a child bride, says a few lines and those lines were actually my mother’s lines which she told us in our childhood. In India, most cases of child marriages are from Rajasthan and since I spent a major part of my life there I can easily understand that. I started writing the story in 1992 and it was always close to my heart. Its success is an example of the fact that the audience connects with stories that are born out of writer’s heart,” says Shekhar.