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The 80's nostalgia

After 27 years, the blockbuster soap opera Buniyaad directed by Ramesh Sippy and Jyoti Sarup is all set to return to DD National and recreate the magic that it once did. One of the landmark series of Indian television, Buniyaad dealt with the 1947 partition. It was aired on Doordarshan way back in 1986 and later had re-runs on the satellite channels.

The series, which redefined the careers of most of its actors that included Alok Nath, Kanwaljeet Singh, Kiran Juneja and Neena Gupta will be aired for the sixth time from next Thursday. The veteran director got the cast together to relive their golden days recently. Alok Nath who played the iconic character of Haveliram reminisces.
‘I hope that this serial will be liked by today's youngesters as much as it was liked by the younger generation of that time,’ Sippy said at the re-launch party of the show.

‘If they don't like it, then no matter as the audience is so diverse today..besides there are audiences who saw it 27 years before, so it will be a nostalgia for them, and they would definitely want to watch it,’ he added.
It took television by a storm when it was first aired in 1986 and saw an entire nation rooting for Master Haveliram and his family as they came to terms with their lives in an epic series set in the years preceding and after the partition.
True to its name, Buniyaad, one of India’s original television mega-serials helmed by the stalwart Ramesh Sippy and Jyoti Sarup, laid the foundation for the evolution of India’s television entertainment industry and defined the contours of its future.

Written by the much celebrated Manohar Shyam Joshi, the series stars Alok Nath, Anita Kanwal, Kiran Joneja, Asha Sharma, Sudhir Pandey, Mazhar Khan, Kanwaljit, Dalip Tahil, Soni Razdan and Neena Gupta amongst others. The characters played by these actors are remembered with nostalgia today by millions of viewers.
Such was the impact of Buniyaad on the viewers that for many years, these actors were known by the names of the characters they played. Hence, for an entire generation Alok Nath was known as Masterji, Anita Kanwal was identified as his wife Laajo Ji and Kiran Juneja as Veeravali, Masterji’s sister in the serial by the viewers.

The classic tale is back for today’s audience. The story of Master Haveliram falling in love and eventually marrying Laajo Ji, their family, separation and reunion in the aftermath of India’s partition has as much going for it today as it did in the late eighties.

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