It only takes one idea to change the world. Bill Gates, Mother Teresa, and the Wright brothers are proof, as are Hitler, Oprah, and Darwin. However, the world, like Douglas Adams’ definition of space, is vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big, and several such people, and ideas, often go unnoticed. Take Ekta Kapoor for instance. Ekta Kapoor transformed the Indian soap opera scene, created jobs for millions of wannabe actors, past-times for millions of housewives around the country who diligently follow those shows, and business for the pharmacies that witnessed a tremendous increase in the sale of migraine medication, especially for other members of the said housewives’ families.

For some time, we watched silently as new shows hatched on TV like an amphibian’s eggs. Like these eggs too, the shows were identical to one another, with possibly different underlying DNA sequences, which were invisible to the normal, frustrated Indian viewer’s eyes. Meanwhile, we watched as our friends lost their jobs to the sinking economy, still others succumbed to the grad-school option, and rich CEOs lined up outside the (not-so) White House for bailouts.

And then, we made the connection.

If your college degree seems to be taking you nowhere, we have the perfect bailout package for you. We present: The Great Indian Soap Opera Plot Generator. It’s fast, it’s cheap, and it’s tried and tested a thousand times over. Follow the directions and you will have your very own show within minutes!

1. The Title - As a newbie, you may think you would need to have a plot before you have a title, but here’s news you could use: the title is absolutely irrelevant. Pick an old Bollywood song and snatch a phrase, open the dictionary to a random page and choose a random noun, or listen to an Indian numerologist and come up with a title that has multiple words that begin with the same letter (for example, as a tribute to the authors of this scheme, make sure the title starts with an ‘N’)

2. The Location - Write down the names of five random cities; put them in a hat and pick one. The shooting will take place wherever you want. You can pretend Mumbai is Switzerland – nobody will really care.

3. The Characters - Character development is important, but not terribly hard. You must have at least five generations of a family living in the same house (which just happens to be a mansion). You should have the loving grandmother, her dutiful sons, their vengeful wives, their alternately good and bad children, and so forth. They will all, of course, be businessmen (and women).

4. Casting - We realize that you will be operating on a negligible budget, so we suggest casting relatives of rich producers (who will finance your show), or others who are willing to pay to be on your show. Don’t worry, you’ll find thousands - how else do you think the shows on TV make profits? A word of caution though - fire anybody who shows the slightest promise of succeeding in the acting industry. Employing anybody with talent is a big no-no.

5. Sound effects - Get an out-of-work music composer to compose two sets of sound effects for you - one that sounds like someone is going to die and another that sounds like thunder. Alternate with the effects based on the mood. Trust us, you will need nothing else.

6. Costumes and Make-Up - Make the actors act in the clothes they came into work with. Their fashion sense is probably just as good as the audience’s. Buy a TON of cheap make-up though. It is important to disguise the actors’ real looks, in case the audience accidently mistakes the soap opera for a horror show.

7. Time line - Time on the small screen follows Einstein’s theory of relativity more religiously than anything known to mankind. 30 minutes of Earth time translate into 30 episodes on your show. A single event like a house party could go on for weeks. Capture every blink, every expression of your characters. In short, transform a 2-page story into a 500 episode show.

8. Plot - Speaking of 2 page stories, all you need for your core plot is an ‘inspiration’. This is just a euphemism for informal and friendly plagiarism. Pick a fairy tale, an American soap-opera, a Polish film, or another Indian show that everybody has forgotten about. Indianize and EktaKapoor-ize it (i.e. follow above directions carefully), and you’re done.

9. An extra long credits sequence - An Indian soap opera’s success is measured by the number of episodes that have been aired. Hence, it is crucial that you give as little time to the actual story as possible. Credit everyone on the set (including the caterers) and then choose some random celebrity names and add them in the credits as executive producers.

10. Have the will to kill -

a. Kill the protagonist. This is not really a big deal - you can always bring him/her to life, introduce a long-lost twin, etc. Just make sure the dead body is not found.

b. Kill the villain. This will give the audience a false sense of the God-is-in-His-Heaven-and-all-is-right-with-the-world kind of security, and then bring the villain back to life. Refer to 10a.

11. A suspenseful end - Each episode should end with the possibility of something ground-breaking happening in the following episode. We know this will be hard to sustain over the 500 episodes, so the trick is to make the protagonist walk down a set of spiral stairs and focus the camera on his face as he nears the end of his long walk down. The protagonist shall have a look of surprise on his face and the thunder sound effect plays as you freeze-frame his face. Yes, we have goosebumps too.

You may wonder why we revealed this great idea (patent pending) to the whole world when we could have cashed in on it ourselves. Well, one of us has a job and the other one is protected from the real world by a phenomenon called College.

We don’t create the melodrama, we just sit back and watch.

Note:

Extras - extras must be at least five times less good looking then the female protagonist. This can be easily accomplished by applying a ton of makeup on the actress and none on the extras.

Photo Courtesy: Nimisha Mittal, out to prove to the world that MS Paint is not completely useless.