They create stereotypes and regularly reinforce them

The Indian Television Industry might be the reason why most Bahu and Saas relations are strained. Their conception that a Saas and Bahu relationship is almost always plagued with this competitive urge to prove to the Son that he should favour one and not the other. These self created stereotypes might actually make the fickle audience of these shows do these very things. Furthermore, they create idealized images of The Perfect Bahu and The Perfect Son. Now what these idealized images do is that they provide a benchmark for the housewife viewership to compare with their very own Bahu’s and Son’s. The Perfect Bahu is characterised to be a person who takes care of her family, stays at home, does all the chores and does not bother her mother in law for anything, obeys almost everything that she’s told to do, and must sacrifice all her dreams and aspirations for the sake of the family. The desire to have a “Perfect Bahu” makes the oh-so-intelligent viewers alter the behaviour of their Daughter-in-laws who may be modern educated women who want to assert their independence by taking on jobs…these serials project the ideology of “Mere paas toh paise hai toh tereko kamane ki kya zaroorat” and their avid viewers go implementing the same. Endless Storylines A typical Indian Show is telecasted 4 days a week, throughout the year. So the writers obviously have no time to think of a plot while the USA counterparts follow the seasonal approach, with even only one show being telecasted per week, thus the writers are actually able to think before they dish out something. An Indian Show is continued for the sake of employment of all the members concerned and there exists nothing artistic about it. The plot starts from nowhere and it leads to nowhere. Whereas there are definite goals and objectives set in mind in a US television series. The Indian television series on the other hand does nothing more than act as a National Rural Employment Guarantee Act for all the actors concerned, who otherwise might have been sleeping on park benches, trying to somehow break into the already overcrowded world of bollywood.