Image Is Everything
Standing on the threshold of a new millennium — at ground zero — we are confronted by a world where a day’s reality seems to melt away in the wake of the next. Each season’s allotment of recognisable images, for an instant so salient and compelling, are soon consumed by a black hole. Like clockwork, new images, new fascinations, new emergencies, arrive to take their place.

‘Rajni’, Kavita Chowdhry of ‘Udaan’, Neean Gupta from ‘Saans’, Tulsi, Clinton and Monica, Windows 95, break dancing, remixes, Botox, Saddam, and now Jassi. Along the way, social memory, a sense of continuity, slips away. This perpetually changing field of vision has, for many contributed to a sense that meaning has no half-life, that we occupy a time of no enduring ideas, no over arching values or questions.

Given this, every time an image or icon has taken birth, it’s nudged our attitudes just a little further.
“TV is a more intimate viewing environment than movies or other out-of-home entertainment. It has therefore a very different impact,” points Mr Lulla.

While movies in the 60s flashed images of fashion and centred around values and morals; 70s brought action and romance; then as TV arrived in the 80s and Cable TV arrived in the 90s, movies were no more the only source of images for viewers, he explains.

“TV is also a more real medium than cinema. And when you tell a story of a very human character, the impact is greater. You can create something for everyone to take away from the series. There’s a lesson for parents — that there’s something good in your child that you should recognise, trust your child,” says Deeya Singh, co producer of JJKN. “I read the script and thought I want a daughter like Jassi!”

“When we began production for this show,
I also remembered a quote I had heard once: Your serial should ‘divide the family’ who is viewing it. In the sense that each member should have a different opinion. And Jassi sometimes throws up situations which are debatable.”