Everything comes with an expiry date, no?

Five years, nearly 1500 Episodes, a plentiful of The ITA Awards and one of the longest runs in Television, what with weeks after weeks of being perched at the top of the Popularity-charts – “Diya aur Baati Hum’ (Star Plus) has been all of that and much more. Even when it was rather melodramatically told, it often resonated because it was an off-beat story of an ambitious girl, Sandhya (Deepika Singh), aspiring to be an IPS but suddenly getting married to a Halwaai, Suraj (Anas Rashid) and into a strictly conservative household that is under the thumb of a Matriarch, ‘Bhaabho’ (Neelu Vaghela), who’s is dead against such aspirations in her Bahu’s. But then, Suraj gives anchorage to Sandhya’s dreams and the two become ‘Diya’ and ‘Baati’, braving all the gales that come their way.

But today, the winds blowing against the Show have proven to be too strong, as a result of which it finds itself in its last gasps. The fag-end has come because of viewer fatigue and the internal spats and squabbles, particularly between the leads, Anas (Rashid) and Deepika (Singh Goyal), (the latter even slapped the former once, reportedly).

Then, Anas has been in skirmishes with other members of cast too, like recently with Kunal Khosla (Chhotoo), who is said to have left the show because of him. Anas also seemed to have rubbed the former director of the show and Deepika’s hubby Rohit Raj Goyal the wrong way, resulting in a constant trail of heated arguments between the two.

The Producers,  however, have been living in denial about these developments as Shashi MIttal (the better half and co-producer with Sumeet Mittal) once said that it’s just like when a large family lives together for long, some feuds do happen therein, but they are of no consequence.

However, all of that has accumulated to weigh the show down and of late, it has just not been able to regain its former peaks of popularity. Now whether it will return in a second season or it is curtains forever for it remains anybody’s guess. The reality of the situation, today, is that it’s being replaced by Mahesh Bhatt’s, ‘Naamkaran’, a TV take-off of his own big screen success, ‘Zakhm’.

So with a heavy heart…

Adieu, Diya/Baati…! 

- Vierendra Bhargav