The passing of Piyush Pandey brought back memories of his most enduring contribution to Indian popular culture: the 1988 Doordarshan musical medley Mile Sur Mera Tumhara. Working as an account manager at Ogilvy & Mather, Pandey had penned lines that became a rare government broadcast, a lyrical celebration of India’s diversity escaping the usual tedium of public service messaging on state television.

Mile Sur brought together the biggest names in Indian entertainment, all humming Pandey’s words on the small screen. Two decades later, in 2010, the medley was recreated with a new roster of celebrities. But this time, barely anyone noticed.

What changed in those 20 years?

The magic of 1988

The original Mile Sur aired on Doordarshan in 1988, reportedly at the behest of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi himself. Conceived and directed by Suresh Malik and Kailash Surendranath for Ogilvy & Mather, with music by Ashok Patki and Louis Banks, it offered something Doordarshan rarely delivered: glamour.

In that era, the national broadcaster prided itself on austerity, deliberately shunning celebrity culture. Against the backdrop of insurgencies in Punjab and Assam, Doordarshan favoured earnest lectures on national integration. 

Mile Sur broke that mold. It was generous with star power: Amitabh Bachchan, Mithun Chakraborty, Kamal Haasan, Hema Malini, Sunil Gavaskar, Prakash Padukone, PT Usha, alongside classical legends like Pandit Bhimsen Joshi and M Balamuralikrishna.

For a generation starved of celebrity sightings on television, this was irresistible. The medley succeeded because it wrapped its message of unity in the rare thrill of seeing these icons together in one place.

There were other memorable touches too. A brief shot showed cricketers Arun Lal and filmmaker Mrinal Sen alighting from Calcutta Metro’s sleek coaches – a glimpse of modernity that seemed to promise a transformed urban India. For children in small towns and rural areas, even the metro was a kind of celebrity, a symbol of the future they imagined themselves inheriting.

Why 2010 failed

By 2010, that future had arrived, but it looked nothing like what Mile Sur had promised.

The sequel featured even more celebrities, and was re-recorded for a January 26 telecast by Zoom TV. But no one cared. 

In the intervening decades, liberalisation had transformed India's media landscape. Private satellite channels proliferated, offering round-the-clock access to film stars and sports icons. The internet arrived, and with it, social media stripped away whatever mystique remained around celebrities.

Celebrity darshan became anachronistic. Stars were now as ubiquitous as cola bottles, popping up on mobile screens constantly, competing desperately for attention. They appeared too often, burned too bright, and exhausted their glow.

The sequel also failed to reckon with how India's relationship with its own aspirations had soured. Take the Delhi Metro, which by 2010 had become one of urban India's defining shared experiences. Unlike the gleaming Calcutta Metro of 1988, a symbol of possibility, the Delhi Metro arrived fully formed, carrying the weight of maturity without the charm of infancy. The children of the eighties had grown up and boarded their own metros. They had to reconcile the gleaming promise of those fleeting 1988 images with the mundane reality of their daily commutes.

So for many commuters, it felt less like progress and more like a monument to alienation, reducing traveling masses to insignificant numbers clinging to poles in overcrowded coaches.

The original Mile Sur succeeded also because Doordarshan had a monopoly on Indian eyeballs. In 1988, a middle-class home meant a television tuned to a single channel, creating genuine shared visual experiences across the country.

That collective gaze dissolved over two decades. One generation remembers growing up on Doordarshan’s musical homilies about national integration. The next scrolls through social media, trolling or fawning over celebrities. The “imagined community” that the 1988 lineup appealed to fragmented into countless micro-communities, each with its own icons and platforms.

By 2010, the image overload of the digital age meant that Piyush Pandey’s words, however timeless, couldn’t compete. Not because the message was wrong, but because the medium had fundamentally changed. In an era of infinite content, the stars who delivered that message had become background noise.

Mile Sur Mera Tumhara remains a powerful piece of national memory, a reminder of a time when bringing people together meant showing them something rare and precious. Its sequel’s failure taught a different lesson. That in an age of abundance, scarcity itself becomes a luxury. And once the stars are everywhere, they stop glowing altogether.

If you liked this piece, let our reporters tell you why you should subscribe to Newslaundry.