A blast from the past

I heard from an ex-colleague from Zee TV today and the call brought back memories of the wonderful years I spent there, from year 2000 to 2004. One of my best memories is of the time when I was the Executive Producer of a series known as 'Chausath Panne' which was a series of 64 episodic short stories. We launched the series with a successful story - Dil Naa Jaane Kyon, starring Kirron Kher, Ritu Chowdhury and Vikas Sethi.
Since I was working long hours on that project I developed a great rapport with the show producers Rupali and Pintoo Guha. They had submitted the proposal of this show to the Zee TV team a couple of months earlier and it came to my attention when I was in the Ideation team of Zee, then headed by Vinta Nanda. Eventually they bagged the contract and the show went on air.
It is amazing how people remember the tiny things you do for them. Rupali used to always tell me how much it meant to her to have a show on air. She and her husband went on to produce many more shows for the channel. I'm not in touch with them too often now, but I'm sure they're doing well for themselves.
Sometime in 2005, when I was with Zoom TV, I got a call from Rupali saying that I had to watch the episode of their second show on Zee - Tumhari Disha. Apparently in that night's episode they were introducing a key character - that of a lady police inspector and they had decided to name the character 'Kanchan Koppikar', as their way of showing me how much they appreciated what I had done for them! I was quite embarassed about the whole thing but it was too late to do anything about it - the episode was due to go on air in just a couple of hours.
As luck would have it I missed the episode that night, but my parents and sisters watched it and they said they were almost rolling on the floor with laughter when the show ended with the actress, playing the inspector, look straight into the camera and say "Mera naam hain Inspector Koppikar...Kanchan Koppikar" followed by three cuts of her close-up and highly dramatic background music. I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me when I heard that.
Many months later when I met my future husband, he said that in an idle moment he ran up a search on my name on Google and didn't know what to make of the results that read 'Kanchan Koppikar is an Inspector........'