Evolution of Indian television?

Had been to N and A's for dinner. They have a subscription to a hindi music channel. I was excited to watch Indian television after eons but what followed was a culture shock. I mean what is Indian television headed towards really? What they try to portray by aping the west is not the real India....not the soul of the people or the essence of the culture. There are innumerable music channels playing the same songs which are either remixes or *inspired* hip-hop numbers. The videos look all the same, similar looking girls, similarly dressed (read skimpily) and similar dance steps (read obscene). Or the other channels run the never-ending saas-bahu soaps!
That set me thinking about the evolution of Indian television in my quarter life.
My earliest memories of television was Lucy on Doordarshan. I simply loved it as a kid. Then there was Yeh jo hai zindagi on Friday evenings and of course Chitrahaar on Wednesday evenings. That was our only choice and we were content. Our viewing was also restricted by mom. Ramayana/Mahabharata, Bikram or Betaal, He-Man, Spiderman, Quiz Time (Siddharth Basu rocked!) , The world this week and a few more was all she let us watch or all that was there to watch. 9 o clock news on DD (Salma Sultan was one of the news readers) was religiously watched.
At that time the possibility of having 50 channels seemed unfathomable. "50 channels, that too all night, you must be kiddin!"
DD2 arrived when I was in my teens....superhit muqabla was the first countdown show I had ever watched and it seemed like a cool concept. But very soon there were hundred other countdown shows and it lost its charm. Cable tv had just been introduced but it had the power of hampering our studies and so was kept away. Then one fine day dad realized that espn and star sports would let him watch sports 24/7, so we stepped into the world of more than 2 channels on television!
First few months I was addicted .... Wonder years, Crystal Maze, Mash, Bold and the beautiful on Star, Nonie and Danny McGill on Channel V, discovery channel, BBC , Star Movies ........
Hip hip hurray and Banegi apni baat on Zee I was hooked to too.
Later there was Mastermind, the Big Fight, Cyrus on MTV, Friends, Dharma and Greg, Mr.Bean and many more interesting shows which I enjoyed watching.
Down the years the influence of Bollywood percolated through all the channels ... and one fine day Ekta Kapoor conquered. Thus followed the downfall of Indian television. Well, downfall not for the profit makers and lot of the junta- the rising TRPs were evidence ... but for a sensible television watcher, it was a catastrophe!
Now television is a money making factory churning out serials from the same plot instead of the media of mass communication that it was intended to be..... very much like current newspapers, where Page 3 is the most read and the frontpage headlines include stories about celebrity affairs leaving space for important issues only in a small corner inside. And noone is to be blamed for this other than us - 'cause they make what we demand. They ape the west, we follow. They make run of the mill soap operas, we cry 'cause Mihir died. They portray women clad in small pieces of cloth, the stores start selling them. They copy songs, we download the ringtones on our mobile devices. They dance to our tunes, we dance to theirs. Fair enough!