Chitrahaar

Chitrahaar is television program on DD National featuring song clips from Bollywood films. It was widely watched in the 1970s.^[1] The word literally means 'a garland of pictures', or more liberally, 'a story of pictures'. It airs for half an hour every Friday on prime-time, where the videos of the latest songs in Hindi film (Bollywood) music are televised.

History

It is the longest-running film-based programme in TV history, having started in the 1960s, and was widely watched in the 1970s. It was popular even outside India, especially in places like the Middle East or the Unites State of America, which had a large number of people of Indian origin.

DD started another show called Rangoli that is based on the same film-music theme and has wide rural viewership.

With the advent of cable TV in the 1990s, the viewership of DD has drastically dropped in urban areas, but it is still popular in the rural regions.

In 1997, both Chitrahaar and Rangoli went back to private producers, with Chitrahaar going to Amit Khanna of Plus Channel and Rangoli to Dheeraj Kumar of Creative Eye^[2]

Lately, Chitrahaar has started using same language subtitling (SLS), where Hindi subtitles of the song's lyrics scroll across the screen.^[3] The idea behind SLS is that people who are just learning to read would benefit by reading lyrics of the songs they are listening to and watching. It's an engaging way to promote literacy, especially in villages. This initiative of Doordarshan has been technically supported by Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

References

External links

• Article in the Indian Express on SLS Archived 2 May 2005 at the Wayback Machine.