Once upon a time, and it isn’t so long ago as nostalgia would like to claim, the living room television was the shared hearth of middle-class Indian homes. Its soft flicker drew families together after dinner, when the day’s worries could be folded away for a while. Grandparents, parents and children, and later, husband and wife alone, might still bicker over what to watch, but there was something democratic, even intimate, in that nightly negotiation.The great paradox of progress, of course, is that it grants precisely what we once fought over, and quietly takes away what made the fight worth it. Today, in countless homes, couples in their forties and above, sit under the same roof yet watch entirely different worlds unfold.
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