like many other old favourites buniyaad is also back on doordarshan amid the nationwide lockdown and director ramesh sippy is thrilled that even after over three decades the serial has tremendous recall valuethe show written by manohar shyam joshi dealt with partition and its aftermathit has been more than 30 years and the show still has recall value people remember it even today they associate it with the partition todays young generation has forgotten all that it has been more than 70 years but still somewhere in the families the stories are there sippy toldthe director said the show which debuted in the late 1980s captured the sentiment of indias birth pangsof course the younger generation cant look back the same way as the older generation did but i hope they discover the show now sippy addedaccording to the director the journey of buniyaad began when the ministry of information and broadcasting invited his father filmmaker producer gp sippy and suggested them to do a show for doordarshanfor sippy who was used to working on multistarrers like sholay seeta aur geeta and shaan the idea of helming a tv show was exciting but he was initially reluctant about itnot understanding the medium properly enough was a reason but this kind of storytelling had begun in the west with some soap operas i took the trouble of going through some of those and understand how they are telling their stories to understand the craftmanohar shyam joshi had prior experience of doing 100 plus episodic shows on dd mainly hum log so he had begun to understand this kind of breakup of a story into so many parts and keeping the audience engrossed he addedthe 105episode buniyaad featured a cast comprising mostly new actors alok nath anita kanwar goga kapoor sudhir pandey dalip tahil neena gupta and kiran juneja who later married the sholay directoralmost all of them were new we took a lot of people from the national school of drama it was also where i met my wife its true that amit khanna our executive producer brought her to the set she had worked on tv before done modelling too and the moment she walked in i knew i had got the perfect castingsippy recalled how a crew of nearly 200 people with cooks and a running kitchen virtually camped at film city for months to shoot the show with the director working 1820 hours a daythere was also a strike in between and we had to move everything a 100 miles out of mumbai for threefour weeks because a serial cannot stop we had to shift to gujarat there were some problems with the associations dd had started to make a dent in the cinemas the film people were all up in arms how now you have with the ott platformsbut that was the first kind of competition to cinema being a big cinema maker myself my own people were working against me that was something we