When Tarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah (TMKOC) started it was a big hit. It was also like a breath of fresh air for Indian television. At that time, Indian shows were filled with saas-bahu (mother-in-law & daughter-in-law respectively) melodramas. TMKOC, on the other hand, was a sitcom based on a society called Gokuldham. It revolved around the daily ‘mundane’ life of those people living in that society. Even though, now, I cringe at some of those old episodes. There is no doubt that the old episodes were quite wholesome and enjoyable. It was the ‘Sarabha vs Sarabhai’ (another generation-defining sitcom) for our generation.

Now, after almost 14 years since it was first aired, and 3.6k episodes (YES!) TMKOC is still going on. A few days back I came across one of their episodes on YouTube. And it was unwatchable. I haven’t seen anything as useless as this. And this is coming from someone who has watched Action Replayy in theatres. There is no content, most of the stars who had started the show have also left but still, they are dragging it on.

On the other hand, TVF (The Viral Fever) started as a YouTube channel before widening its horizons. With respect to Indian standards of comedy, TVF has been quite good. Far better than anything that’s going on. And one of their ‘mantra’ for this has been quality over quantity. One of the TVF founders summed it up in a talk-show adda nicely:

To create a good content of 1 minute, it takes 100s of hours. I don’t know how anyone can go on for 10 years on the TV and still maintain the quality of the content.

When I look at most of the ‘LinkedIn influencers’, I feel they follow the path of Tarak Mehta rather than TVF. LinkedIn is a social networking platform where you can share any updates about your work: your learning, difficulties in a project, some useful resources etc. But now it is just filled with cringe content. Each one of us, who is working, will have some important things to share if we are true to ourselves and the work that we are doing. But it is hard to come up with something valuable every other day. Even the CEO of a successful company will fail miserably to do this.

It is absolutely fine to post an ‘aesthetic’ picture with a cheesy quote on Instagram or Twitter. Hell, even I don’t mind looking at it. But to pretend you have learnt something great and it is the same old BS, that’s just irritating. There are so many posts where the content of the post and the picture don’t even have any correlation! There is still some value in LinkedIn, so it will survive but I hope it pivots soon from the ‘Tarak Mehta’ way to the ‘TVF’ way.

P.S.: While re-reading the whole post before publishing, I realised I have rambled a bit here. But it is what it is.