Whatever else may or may not have been the contribution of Jeetendra, known for years as Jumping Jack, to the world of Hindi entertainment, his daughter Ekta is certainly a major contribution indeed. For a person who cannot seem to be able to decide if she wants to be in front of the camera or behind it, Ekta Kapoor seems to have a smart brain behind those coloured tresses and demeanor of Punjabi simplicity (?).

Then again, it would be a good question to ask… is she really such a sharp business brain that today Balaji Telefilms is the name behind every second serial on Star Plus? Or is it just that the advent of a new social age has happily coincided with the advent of the phenomenon called Ekta Kapoor? Perhaps it was just that the world was ready for designer women and she was ready to present them. Perhaps these are simply the blessings of Lord Balaji, the star performer in business strategy decisions in the Kapoor household.

So then, the long list of Balaji's serials is a what's what of TV soaps today. What, however, strikes one is the perfect uniformity of actresses in all these serials. Maybe only the discerning have noticed, but it is beyond a doubt true that every woman antagonist or protagonist in each of her serials has a personal designer for everything from hair clips, lipsticks, eye shadow, dresses or saris and even gestures like raised eyebrows and flashing pupils. This could have been a good thing except that all these personal designers seem to have trained under one very tough teacher. This teacher has ensured that Shaina looks just like Pallavi, looks just like the antagonist in Kkusum, and Parvati bhabhi looks just like Tulsi, who looks just like Kkusum; the saasu maa in SBKBT looks just like the saas in KGGK, who in turn looks just like saas in Kkusum and so on.

The list could be endless if only one could sit through an entire gamut of Balaji Telefilms serials. But after a while the Poonam saris in carefully draped styles, the designer blouses, the glittering bindis, the uniform eye gestures and smirks, the perennially raised eyebrows, the straight falling burnished hair (from the Oberoi salon, no doubt), the diamond mangalsutras and of course, the ineffectual begging-to-be-noticed husband in tow, take their toll on the senses. Even the storylines run astonishingly similarly. The saas starts off by loving the young love of her son's life and welcoming her in their house.

Invariably it is an industrialist family; the middle class salary earners are treated with as much contempt as Tejal's husband in SBKBT. So the Gautiered bedrooms and whatever drawing rooms (that are, for all their richness, not always in good taste), can confuse everyone. The saas, however, discovers her bahu's evil intentions on her a) family honor, b) family jewels (?), c) family business, d) family home and property, and the worst e) on her son's affections. The bahus, either like Parvati bhabhi worship the ground Maaji walks on, dispelling all doubts about them being sharks. Or like Pallavi and Shaina are really the sharks, revenge-seeking or plain importance-seeking beauties that every self-respecting family has to be careful of. But then, they could kill with the monotony of their saris, their mauve lipsticks in 20 shades or even their smirks.

The radical shift in the attitudes of these women from their preceding generation is that their brains do not EVER leave the air-conditioned confines of their four walls (just like their grandmothers' didn't, even AFTER foreign degrees and business running experience). All they do for passing a lifetime is scheme against the latest maneuver of a mother or sister-in-law. Besides, their substance is only about which sister-in-law can outdo with one. Their world seems to have shrunk to the doings of their saas and undoing of their nanads, peppered by some infidelity from husbands. One would say that in terms of the woman of 2000, the world has become a much smaller place.

So what makes a multitude of women discard the welfare of their loving husbands and happy families at 10 p.m. every weekday to watch these witches in action?

Why, the question could be answered if we found out why The Bold And The Beautiful is having its umpteenth rerun even after about 15 years of production. So maybe, we shall be sitting with our grandchildren still watching how Shaina gets her own back on her much more glamorous (and by all accounts, much smarter) mum-in law, the trying-very hard-to-be-evil Sudha Chandran.