For those of you who don’t know Ekta Kapoor, she heads the Indian Television Production Company called ‘Balaji Telefilms’. This company is responsible for the creation of India’s (and now Sri Lanka’s) most loved soaps. For example the Indian show titled ‘Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahi Thi’ which has now been on air for 7 years has just completed about 4 years in Sri Lanka under the name ‘Mahagedara’.

For most people soaps are a means of passing time and are usually considered a waste of time. People can’t be blamed for forming such opinions when you throw in storylines of complicated pregnancy, extra marital affairs, people returning from the dead and vicious vamps who are out to get the man of their dreams by killing anyone needed to do so.

But beyond the twisted storylines that confuse the shit out of you, these dramas also try to deal with social issues. Soaps of the Western world are successful in getting such messages across to the public – for instance, Dynasty dealt with Homosexuality while One Life To Live helped with a campaign to battle Breast Cancer. All My Children has dealt with issues pertaining to Alcoholism and Rape while The Bold and The Beautiful has helped with educating folks further on AIDS.

Sri Lankan dramas may never get even point three inches close to getting such messages across but in that aspect, Indian Television, I must say has come a long way. This is where we get back to Ekta Kapoor.

She is a woman with firm beliefs who understands current issues and tries to eradicate them from society through her shows. Example… There was a time when the women of India went through major trauma with their husbands when it came to determining the sex of their children. They needed to be educated that the sex of any child is determined more by the male genes than the female and it was done, through drama.

An area Kapoor takes very seriously is rape because statistics show that a total number of 36 million women are raped in India every year. Through her soaps she attempts to address this broad issue and make people understand the pain of enduring such a hideous crime and how dealing with it afterward doesn’t get any better. She holds no boundary when it comes to portraying it either.

What is sad though is that such important messages do come across all wrapped up in a package that is so focussed on entertainment, that people forget the seriousness of the problem.

The video below is from an epsidoe of one such drama, which aired two nights ago.

Warning: If you choose to press play, please do so at your own discretion. The sounds and visuals on this particular video are disturbing (they were to me anyway) and deals with the issue of rape. For those who will press play anyway, I just wanted to show you an example of what I meant when I said that Ekta removes all barriers when she wants a message put across.

B.