Speaking at a gathering of the Virat Hindu Sammelan (Mammoth Hindu Assembly), one of the guests of honor, Ramanand Sagar, spoke of his work as the maker (producer–director–script writer) of the Ramayan serial. All he had done was to take a cloth, he said, and wipe the dust of the old treasures everyone knew about, but had lately ignored. That had been the extent of his role, he concluded modestly. That was how the Ramayan serial should be perceived, he was saying, as a reminder of a forgotten presence. Its production was therefore a simple matter, requiring no thought or skill, he implied. Sagar's humility notwithstanding, his statement said something interesting about television: even when depicting something as contrived as a pre–historic epic, the medium could be treated as transparent, and as having no effect of its own. The politically charged decision to broadcast a mythological serial on a government medium, at a time when Hindu–Muslim relations had been wracked by violence, and Sagar's own decision to offer an obscurantist rendition of the narrative, at times reinforcing themes of the VHP's own campaign (see below), receded in his homely explanation. The salient event appeared rather to be that of story telling, his modesty reflecting in its own way the importance of the teller, in a society where television was still a recent arrival.