Rover_Wow
06-10-2005, 11:35 PM
The scariest part about this story? They wouldn't be the first in the world to do it. Thailand has blurred out smoking on TV for a couple years now, and IMO, it wreaks havoc on archive material like (say) Charlie Chaplin lighting up in an early silent, or a famous poster of Madonna with a ciggie.
Bollywood fumes at onscreen smoking ban
June 05 2005 at 03:15PM
By Anindita Ramaswamy
New Delhi - Imagine Humphrey Bogart with a blur hanging off his lip in Casablanca or Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan as the rebel who chews a pencil instead of a beedi, a sun-dried leaf rolled with tobacco.
A ban on smoking in films and television serials, announced on May 31, World No Tobacco Day, by Indian Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss, has sparked off a nationwide debate on creative expression and the ills of tobacco. It comes into effect on August 1.
Films already shot have to edit smoking scenes and any references to cigarette brands. Old films, both foreign and Indian, shown on television will have a mandatory scroll about the hazards of smoking or will have the smoking scenes blurred.
The information and broadcasting ministry, which regulates film and TV content, called the ban "hasty" and said some onscreen smoking may be necessary to depicts the evils of addiction. It said the ban could affect creativity and documentary films that need to show tobacco use.
Officials of the two ministries were to meet later this month to discuss how to implement Ramadoss's daunting plan.
India has the world's largest motion picture industry, producing about 1 000 films in more than eight languages a year. Bollywood is the popular Hindi language film industry, with an estimated 15 million people watching a Bollywood film each day.
Since the satellite TV boom of the 1980s, India now has 250 channels and the number is growing. Many are uplinked from Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore and Israel and are therefore outside the jurisdiction of Indian laws.
There are more than ten 24-hour movie channels and several sports channels with events such as Formula 1 racing dotted with advertisements from international tobacco firms Marlboro and Dunhill.
Tobacco was introduced in India by Portuguese traders
An increasing number of foreign and Hollywood films are screened in Indian theatres, with 285 shown last year alone. The health ministry will need a special tobacco police if it wants to monitor all this content.
The other statistics are equally overwhelming. A whopping 250 million Indians, one quarter of the country's population, uses tobacco.
About 50 percent smoke beedis, while 36 percent chew tobacco. Officials said about 900 000 people die of diseases related to tobacco use each year.
Health minister Ramadoss said increasing numbers of teenagers and women were smoking in India. "Film stars are role models for millions of adolescents, who often get addicted not fully realising the health hazards of tobacco use."
The World Health Organisation (WHO) agrees. In a February 2003 study, Bollywood: Victim Or Ally?, it claimed Bollywood encouraged teenagers to smoke and recommended onscreen smoking should be stopped.
The study was based on the Thumbs Up! Thumbs Down! project of the American Lung Association of Sacramento-Emigrant Trails that was designed to raise awareness about the impact of tobacco use in the movies on young people.
WHO youth researchers reviewed 440 Bollywood films between 1991 to 2002 and found that tobacco portrayal was prevalent in 76 per cent. It said in earlier films only the villains smoked, but increasingly most Bollywood films also showed heroes lighting up.
The study said teenagers who watched films that showed the good guys smoking became three times more likely to try cigarettes. "I remember in my young age I was very influenced by Dev Anand's (popular film star of the 1950s) smoking," the study quoted Indian film maker Subhash Ghai as saying.
"There was a perception that a person who smokes, thinks better, is a better actor, better artiste. And that an artiste is not creative unless he smokes."
Actor and director Amol Palekar said the ban amounted to censorship. "There are adequate regulations which govern advertising of cigarette and other tobacco products. We will soon have to ban showing drinking as well because it is more injurious to health and it is a social evil."
"I firmly believe that smoking is injurious to health and it shouldn't be glorified at all," Aamir Khan, one of Bollywood's biggest stars, wrote in the Indian Express newspaper. "That said, I don't think banning smoking in films is the way to go about it."
"If we have to think so much before portraying anything then we might as well stop making films. As I see it, if we can't show any negative emotion in books, films or in any other creative form then we won't have any creative medium left to express our views."
K. Srinath Reddy, head of cardiology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, said: "A talented director or actor does not need a cigarette to depict a debonair hero, menacing villain or a liberated woman. It is certainly not creative to perpetuate such stereotypes."
Tobacco was introduced in India by Portuguese traders in 1600, and became a valuable commodity in barter trade. The first recorded ban was in 1617 when Mughal emperor Jehangir passed an order against smoking tobacco.
In May 2003, India banned advertisements for cigarettes and other tobacco products, prohibited smoking in public places and the sale of cigarettes to minors. However, the implementation of the moves remains poor.
Unfazed by the furore, however, health minister Ramadoss is already planning his next anti-smoking initiative - to have shocking pictorial warnings on cigarette packs. - Sapa-dpa
BTW, we're doing pictoral warnings on the packs as well. (And one cable station held out on blurring for a while, instead putting up an anti-smoking warning on screen instead.)
Blurring also kind of takes the impact out of commercials that are against smoking to begin with. At least one TV station here has aired the "Cats in the Cradle" anti-smoke ad (with a local VO) for like a decade, and that is affected. Also, I saw a programme on advertising a year or so ago, and it affected an excerpt from an American Cancer Society commercial that showed smoking cowboys coughing (as well as a scene of some guy hanging a sausage from his mouth in a sausage ad, just because his dialog had the notion of smoking tied into it!). Of course, stations that don't broadcast from Thailand? Unaffected.
Bonus news from India: Indian soaps are turning into national soapboxes.
India's popular soap operas become a national soapbox
By Scott Baldauf, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Fri Jun 10, 4:00 AM ET
BOMBAY - Tune in to one of India's most popular soap operas, and the stars occasionally sound more like activists than actors. A servant enters the room, but her employer knows that something is wrong.
"I need to take my son to the hospital," the servant says, her eyes welling with tears as she describes his diarrhea symptoms. "He is getting worse."
Immediately the employer looks into the camera - cue the dramatic music - and chooses a course of action. She gathers the servant and the ailing son and rushes them to the doctor, who dutifully states what global health groups say is an effective remedy for fighting the ailment: "What the child really needs is oral rehydration salts to help him retain water."
No, this is not a commercial break. It's the weepy but influential world of India's most popular soap opera, "Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi." While "Kyunki" is usually a standard soap opera of family squabbles and female aspirations, the show is among a growing number that use their influence as an occasional platform to educate viewers, most of them middle-class women and housewives, about a variety of social causes, from treating diarrhea to the rights of women and the importance of donating to tsunami victims.
"Our show is one of the most watched on Indian television, and we are aware that the Hindi-speaking belt of northern India has the highest number of deaths due to diarrhea," says Smriti Irani, who plays the main character on "Kyunki," a tough-as-nails daughter-in-law named Tulsi. So the staff of "Kyunki," with the advice of the World Health Organization and the US Agency for International Development, decided "the most efficient tool to encourage the use of ORS [oral rehydration salts] and to provide a platform for getting the message across was to write it into our script."
It is hard to quantify just how many Indians watch a show like "Kyunki" (whose full title means "because the mother-in-law was once a daughter-in-law.) In much of rural India, the only thing available is Doordarshan, the state-run television station that sticks to a diet of folk music, news shows, and travelogues. But in metro areas, where the population grows each year, cable is the only thing anybody watches. Starting around 8 p.m., 6 of 10 households are tuned into soaps.
Turning to night-time soap operas to project a public-health message may seem an act of genius, or desperation. But the problem of childhood diarrhea is so severe in India - at 550,000 deaths per year, it is the second-leading cause of death for children under the age of 5 - that every avenue for getting the word out is fair game.
"I feel we're a good platform to get a message across," says Monika Bhattacharya, a marketing executive at Star Plus, the channel that carries "Kyunki." "When you show a documentary or a commercial about
AIDS, people just tune it out, but we've done a program about ORS before on 'Kyunki,' and people feel like they are watching a part of the story. They respond to it much better."
The appeal of soaps, Indian fans say, comes from the fact that they peek behind the curtains into the daily problems of the typical - OK, perhaps not-so-typical - Indian joint family. And joint families - where grandparents, two or more sets of married couples, and grandchildren live under one roof - gives the soap operas lots of jealous, infighting, backstabbing material to work with.
"Kyunki" sets the dysfunctional standard that most other soaps try to match. The lead character, Tulsi, played by Smriti Irani, is the perfect daughter-in-law: honest, kind, deferential, and always misunderstood by the other members of her family. Her only ally is her mother-in-law.
If Tulsi is popular among her viewers - most of them Indian housewives themselves - it may be because she has a penchant for taking strong, principled, even violent, stands. For Ms. Irani, playing India's best fictional daughter-in-law comes with a lot of responsibility.
"I do things on TV, knowing that I influence a lot of young women, and I am aware of that responsibility," she says. "People don't appreciate it if you use the emotional bonds they make to characters to influence them in some commercial way. But it's not risky when you're trying to spread the message that has some public benefit."
Can you imagine that happening on, say, Guiding Light?
Bollywood fumes at onscreen smoking ban
June 05 2005 at 03:15PM
By Anindita Ramaswamy
New Delhi - Imagine Humphrey Bogart with a blur hanging off his lip in Casablanca or Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan as the rebel who chews a pencil instead of a beedi, a sun-dried leaf rolled with tobacco.
A ban on smoking in films and television serials, announced on May 31, World No Tobacco Day, by Indian Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss, has sparked off a nationwide debate on creative expression and the ills of tobacco. It comes into effect on August 1.
Films already shot have to edit smoking scenes and any references to cigarette brands. Old films, both foreign and Indian, shown on television will have a mandatory scroll about the hazards of smoking or will have the smoking scenes blurred.
The information and broadcasting ministry, which regulates film and TV content, called the ban "hasty" and said some onscreen smoking may be necessary to depicts the evils of addiction. It said the ban could affect creativity and documentary films that need to show tobacco use.
Officials of the two ministries were to meet later this month to discuss how to implement Ramadoss's daunting plan.
India has the world's largest motion picture industry, producing about 1 000 films in more than eight languages a year. Bollywood is the popular Hindi language film industry, with an estimated 15 million people watching a Bollywood film each day.
Since the satellite TV boom of the 1980s, India now has 250 channels and the number is growing. Many are uplinked from Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore and Israel and are therefore outside the jurisdiction of Indian laws.
There are more than ten 24-hour movie channels and several sports channels with events such as Formula 1 racing dotted with advertisements from international tobacco firms Marlboro and Dunhill.
Tobacco was introduced in India by Portuguese traders
An increasing number of foreign and Hollywood films are screened in Indian theatres, with 285 shown last year alone. The health ministry will need a special tobacco police if it wants to monitor all this content.
The other statistics are equally overwhelming. A whopping 250 million Indians, one quarter of the country's population, uses tobacco.
About 50 percent smoke beedis, while 36 percent chew tobacco. Officials said about 900 000 people die of diseases related to tobacco use each year.
Health minister Ramadoss said increasing numbers of teenagers and women were smoking in India. "Film stars are role models for millions of adolescents, who often get addicted not fully realising the health hazards of tobacco use."
The World Health Organisation (WHO) agrees. In a February 2003 study, Bollywood: Victim Or Ally?, it claimed Bollywood encouraged teenagers to smoke and recommended onscreen smoking should be stopped.
The study was based on the Thumbs Up! Thumbs Down! project of the American Lung Association of Sacramento-Emigrant Trails that was designed to raise awareness about the impact of tobacco use in the movies on young people.
WHO youth researchers reviewed 440 Bollywood films between 1991 to 2002 and found that tobacco portrayal was prevalent in 76 per cent. It said in earlier films only the villains smoked, but increasingly most Bollywood films also showed heroes lighting up.
The study said teenagers who watched films that showed the good guys smoking became three times more likely to try cigarettes. "I remember in my young age I was very influenced by Dev Anand's (popular film star of the 1950s) smoking," the study quoted Indian film maker Subhash Ghai as saying.
"There was a perception that a person who smokes, thinks better, is a better actor, better artiste. And that an artiste is not creative unless he smokes."
Actor and director Amol Palekar said the ban amounted to censorship. "There are adequate regulations which govern advertising of cigarette and other tobacco products. We will soon have to ban showing drinking as well because it is more injurious to health and it is a social evil."
"I firmly believe that smoking is injurious to health and it shouldn't be glorified at all," Aamir Khan, one of Bollywood's biggest stars, wrote in the Indian Express newspaper. "That said, I don't think banning smoking in films is the way to go about it."
"If we have to think so much before portraying anything then we might as well stop making films. As I see it, if we can't show any negative emotion in books, films or in any other creative form then we won't have any creative medium left to express our views."
K. Srinath Reddy, head of cardiology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, said: "A talented director or actor does not need a cigarette to depict a debonair hero, menacing villain or a liberated woman. It is certainly not creative to perpetuate such stereotypes."
Tobacco was introduced in India by Portuguese traders in 1600, and became a valuable commodity in barter trade. The first recorded ban was in 1617 when Mughal emperor Jehangir passed an order against smoking tobacco.
In May 2003, India banned advertisements for cigarettes and other tobacco products, prohibited smoking in public places and the sale of cigarettes to minors. However, the implementation of the moves remains poor.
Unfazed by the furore, however, health minister Ramadoss is already planning his next anti-smoking initiative - to have shocking pictorial warnings on cigarette packs. - Sapa-dpa
BTW, we're doing pictoral warnings on the packs as well. (And one cable station held out on blurring for a while, instead putting up an anti-smoking warning on screen instead.)
Blurring also kind of takes the impact out of commercials that are against smoking to begin with. At least one TV station here has aired the "Cats in the Cradle" anti-smoke ad (with a local VO) for like a decade, and that is affected. Also, I saw a programme on advertising a year or so ago, and it affected an excerpt from an American Cancer Society commercial that showed smoking cowboys coughing (as well as a scene of some guy hanging a sausage from his mouth in a sausage ad, just because his dialog had the notion of smoking tied into it!). Of course, stations that don't broadcast from Thailand? Unaffected.
Bonus news from India: Indian soaps are turning into national soapboxes.
India's popular soap operas become a national soapbox
By Scott Baldauf, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Fri Jun 10, 4:00 AM ET
BOMBAY - Tune in to one of India's most popular soap operas, and the stars occasionally sound more like activists than actors. A servant enters the room, but her employer knows that something is wrong.
"I need to take my son to the hospital," the servant says, her eyes welling with tears as she describes his diarrhea symptoms. "He is getting worse."
Immediately the employer looks into the camera - cue the dramatic music - and chooses a course of action. She gathers the servant and the ailing son and rushes them to the doctor, who dutifully states what global health groups say is an effective remedy for fighting the ailment: "What the child really needs is oral rehydration salts to help him retain water."
No, this is not a commercial break. It's the weepy but influential world of India's most popular soap opera, "Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi." While "Kyunki" is usually a standard soap opera of family squabbles and female aspirations, the show is among a growing number that use their influence as an occasional platform to educate viewers, most of them middle-class women and housewives, about a variety of social causes, from treating diarrhea to the rights of women and the importance of donating to tsunami victims.
"Our show is one of the most watched on Indian television, and we are aware that the Hindi-speaking belt of northern India has the highest number of deaths due to diarrhea," says Smriti Irani, who plays the main character on "Kyunki," a tough-as-nails daughter-in-law named Tulsi. So the staff of "Kyunki," with the advice of the World Health Organization and the US Agency for International Development, decided "the most efficient tool to encourage the use of ORS [oral rehydration salts] and to provide a platform for getting the message across was to write it into our script."
It is hard to quantify just how many Indians watch a show like "Kyunki" (whose full title means "because the mother-in-law was once a daughter-in-law.) In much of rural India, the only thing available is Doordarshan, the state-run television station that sticks to a diet of folk music, news shows, and travelogues. But in metro areas, where the population grows each year, cable is the only thing anybody watches. Starting around 8 p.m., 6 of 10 households are tuned into soaps.
Turning to night-time soap operas to project a public-health message may seem an act of genius, or desperation. But the problem of childhood diarrhea is so severe in India - at 550,000 deaths per year, it is the second-leading cause of death for children under the age of 5 - that every avenue for getting the word out is fair game.
"I feel we're a good platform to get a message across," says Monika Bhattacharya, a marketing executive at Star Plus, the channel that carries "Kyunki." "When you show a documentary or a commercial about
AIDS, people just tune it out, but we've done a program about ORS before on 'Kyunki,' and people feel like they are watching a part of the story. They respond to it much better."
The appeal of soaps, Indian fans say, comes from the fact that they peek behind the curtains into the daily problems of the typical - OK, perhaps not-so-typical - Indian joint family. And joint families - where grandparents, two or more sets of married couples, and grandchildren live under one roof - gives the soap operas lots of jealous, infighting, backstabbing material to work with.
"Kyunki" sets the dysfunctional standard that most other soaps try to match. The lead character, Tulsi, played by Smriti Irani, is the perfect daughter-in-law: honest, kind, deferential, and always misunderstood by the other members of her family. Her only ally is her mother-in-law.
If Tulsi is popular among her viewers - most of them Indian housewives themselves - it may be because she has a penchant for taking strong, principled, even violent, stands. For Ms. Irani, playing India's best fictional daughter-in-law comes with a lot of responsibility.
"I do things on TV, knowing that I influence a lot of young women, and I am aware of that responsibility," she says. "People don't appreciate it if you use the emotional bonds they make to characters to influence them in some commercial way. But it's not risky when you're trying to spread the message that has some public benefit."
Can you imagine that happening on, say, Guiding Light?