Azeem - o - shah Shahenshah

The first thought that crossed my mind as I woke up yesterday was, “today is gonna be a real boring day!!!” The thought engulfed me so much that inspite of waking up at 9:30am, I found myself in bed till about 11am. Finally I gathered all the possible courage I could and dragged myself outside my room. I found myself all alone in the living room of my PG and had no other choice but to rely on my soulmate for the past decade for company. I don’t know what I would have done without this dear friend of mine, without whom my life would have been completely different. Whenever I was alone, I could always trust her to entertain me, day time or night time. Don’t worry - I was only referring to the teenagers’ number one choice as invention of the past century – The Television or popularly known as TV.
The TV in the living room of my PG, is a Onida Trintron model which probably made its grand debut in the 90’s. As of now, I could best describe it as pre-historic. I switched on the TV and exercised my finger on the last working buttons of the remote – the channel down and the volume buttons. After a while I was safely able to determine that there was nothing useful going on. Ramu for my neighbouring room had joined me by than and we both collectively decided that the Tom and Jerry Movies which was running on Cartoon Network was the best available choice. As we switched between Tom and Jerry and MTV Roadies 5.0 during the break, we noticed a flicker in the channels every minute or so. Obviously something was wrong in the reception of the channel. After a while, I lost my patience and commented “Uncle ko bol nahin sakte TV change karne ko?” Uncle here refers to our PG owner – Mr Jagjeet Singh and the reason for me to frame the sentence as a question was mainly because I was new to this PG, barely a few months old as compared to Ramu, who has been here for over 1 year. He simply looked at me, laughed and said “Bed ka covers badalte hain….woh bhi bahut hain!!....TV toh bhool hi ja!!” Obviously he was the more experienced one in dealing with uncle and I had to agree with him. I remembered the day about a month back, when my cousins had come over to my place in Mumbai and we talked about corruption in India. My dad had said at that point of time “This is India. You have only two options - Leave it or Love it”. On hearing this, I had proudly replied “I can think of another option – Change it!!”
The situation in my living room yesterday had amazingly exemplified my dad’s statement and it was now upto me to stand up to the challenge and do something to back my statement – Change it. Since the TV could not be changed, I switched my attention to the next best thing. I asked Ramu if he knew how to tune the TV. He replied saying “I hope we can, I myself am tired of watching all those south Indian channels.” I completely agreed with him. Being in Bangalore, we had no choice but to come across regional channels which bore the sign of the sun in the lower right corner with a different suffix to distinguish it from each other. I had come to learn that Sun TV was tamil, Udaya was kannada and Surya was telegu. But for me…all were same. So I took it upon me to try and retune the channels to make sure that we atleast get out favourite channels mainly comprising of sports, music, movies, news and entertainment. Ramu told me …“Ho sake toh, get NDTV good times…acha channel hain” and left the room to take a bath.
I sat myself right up to the screen and started investigating the buttons below the TV screen. After a brief research, I figured out that the ‘search’ button was meant to scan through the frequencies, while ‘memory’ was meant to select the required channel. Soon I was buzzing through the channels, skipping all unwanted ones, until I arrived upon my first success. I stored Zoom on channel 8 as a much needed alternative to MTV for hindi music. My next success was CNBC TV 18, which was my personal choice on channel 27. In another half an hour I had tuned all the movie channels, Discovery Travel and Living, Zee Cafe and AXN in the 30 channels available on this TV. I than set my sight on Ramu’s request - NDTV Good Times. This was a pain, cause I had keep the ‘search’ button pressed on channel 12 for a real long time and I came across all channels but that one. Finally after almost 10 mins of continuous browsing, there it was!! NDTV Good Times finally blasted across the television set. A felt a weird sense of success as I saw a lady prepare a healthy dinner for her guests. I switched back to all channels to make sure I had got them all. Ramu was out by now and when I gave him the good news he exclaimed “Sahi hain dost….great going”
The timing of his dialogue perfectly co-incided with the playing of the song “Azeem – o – shah Shahenshah” from Jodhaa Akbar on Zoom. I just sat there on the couch, turned on the volume and enjoyed the music with a great pride on my small success....... I just sat there with a big smile across my face and not a single worry in my mind. I didn't know what was it, that made me more happy, getting my favourite channels on TV or just the pleasure of doing something different. The music was getting to me as I imagined myself in Akbar’s shoes, coming home victorious from battle!!!
I spent the rest of the day in the style I had been most comfortable with, something Akbar would have surely not approved off. I had a sumptuous fish meal, shopped for the room and passed the day without taking a bath. It was afterall a SUNDAY!!!