Wahiyat Wednesday: How CID duped Indian audiences for two decades
From detecting fingerprints with plain eyes to litmus tests that show radium content in a solution, the CID team either had superpowers or they simply fooled us.
CID is one of the longest-running shows in India, but have you ever realised how it has duped you into believing things that cannot ever happen in the real world?
Many serials have come and gone but CID retained its popularity for a long time, strangely. It first aired on Sony TV on January 21, 1998, and it went off-air after 20 years on October 27, 2018. Who can forget, Daya darwaaza tod do, one of the most iconic dialogues of the crime show? The Crime Investigation Department of Maharashtra had broken over 1000 doors to solve various illegal activities and crimes by the end of their 20-year tenure.
No matter how big the crime is, the CID team of merely 5 to 6 members managed to always solve the mystery. Isn’t that a mystery in itself? They never believed in the concept of transfer or retirement. The core CID team comprised of ACP Praduyman (Shivaji Satam), Senior Inspector Daya (Dayanand Shetty), Senior Inspector Abhijeet (Aditya Srivastava), Dr Salunkhe (Narendra Gupta) and Inspector Fredericks (Dinesh Phadnis). Talking about no concept of retirement, the entire team of CID used the same Toyota Qualis car since the beginning of the show.
Abhijeet made his debut on the show as a criminal but was later included in the CID team. Isn’t it funny?
The show had a cult following, even the non-viewers had shown interests. Except for logic, the show had everything, literally. The concept of the show was different, a tad bit too different, you may say. But at times, the makers dragged the episodes with unnecessarily lengthy dialogues when there was no content available. Did you fall prey?
Even the victims used to call CID first instead of calling the police at the crime scene. Now does that happen in the real world? As if the entire nation has the numbers of ACP Pradyuman, Daya and Abhijeet on speed dial.
The show had also shown us that anybody can be a criminal. For example, ghosts, animals, objects, jokers, etc. But all things said and done, CID clocked 1,547 episodes and with each episode, they gave us several new ideas to commit a crime, didn’t they?
Do you remember how Daya, ACP and Abhijeet used to visit local shops to gather information in order to solve a mystery? The CID team had supernatural powers, they used to wear goggles to capture infra-red radiations and could detect fingerprints with their naked eyes. Slow clap!
In fact, without Inspector Fredericks's not-so-funny jokes the CID team would not have been able to solve a single crime. And Dr Tarika and Dr Salunkhe had the most advanced technology in their lab which scientists across the world are yet to discover. When nothing else works, ACP’s famous dialogue "Daya darwaaza tod do" or "kuch toh gadbad hai Daya" used to work amazingly.
When the show struggled with low budget ACP, Daya and Abhijeet used to wear the same clothes almost in every episode. On a better budget, the team would fly out of India to solve a case. As if, just like India, other countries don’t have any police force either.
Do you remember the Khooni Aatmahatya series of CID? A man killed his friend in a park and then committed suicide. And several similar kinds of murders and suicides followed around the town. After so much investigation, the CID team concluded that someone is forcing everyone to commit murders and then suicides. Such a complicated case I must say!
However, the show had managed to enter the Guinness Book of World Records and Limca Book of Records after they shot for more than 100 minutes without any cuts. Many Bollywood celebrities had also promoted their film in the show.
But as the famous phrase suggests, you can fool some people at some time, but not all the time! Come 2020, in a day and age where the world is progressing at a breathtaking pace, will you opt for CID? We surely won’t!
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