THE PRE-TEXT 5 also targeted as consumers of these images. In an attempt to read 'Reality through romance' Jayeeta Bagchi examines the popular romance series such as Mills and Boon or Silhouette classics. In an attempt to overthrow the patriarchal constrictions that regulate eroticism and the finding of a life partner among middle-class Bengali adolescents, the readers plunge into the romances only to be denied their agency and end up in worse complicity with patriarchal domination. Ipshita Chanda unpacks the findings of a questionnaire-based survey, conducted among 500 respondents divided between Jadavpur University and a small industrial town, focussing on the images of women in the television ads. The projection of the 'modern' woman who does not topple the apple-cart of gender-division of labour in everyday living, the ads are sites of systematic manipulation of women as consumers. In the study, Ipshita makes an interesting attempt at working out the dynamics of the visual images of women and the agenda to be adopted by the activists in the women's movement. The next piece also deals with the television. Nilanjana Gupta tries to assess the impact of television viewing in the social organization of everyday life, especially that of women. This is also based on a survey conducted in a mofussil town, Nilanjana selects a sample of viewers from lower middle-class families to assess the challenge of 'modernity' television brings to their lives - a challenge compounded of consumerist desire and a fear of dissolution of values. The last two articles focus on the cinema. Sangeeta Datta, from her location in London focuses in her paper, as she claims, on the ways in which the new gender identities within and beyond the borders of the Indian nation-state are being fixed or directed by the film and television images. Opening the terrain of viewing women in the era of 'MTV culture' that forms a part of globalized culture. She points to the dual signal of the conservative underpinnings of the 'confused* feminine images and the increase in the right-wing homogenized images based on ethnic and religious identity. Drawing on her experience of making a documentary film on women film makers, she has also touched on the Indian women film makers in their attempt to direct 'female gaze' at female subjectivities. In the final piece, Shohini Ghosh analyses a best-selling popular film Hum Aapke Hai Kaun to bring out the reinforcement of the ideal of the family despite all the exotic trapping. However she goes on to point out how the single viewing through an author-viewer complicity in upholding the patriarchal norms is broken up into plural