After that, she threw the girlfriend on the floor and proceeded to beat her up mercilessly while the neighbours, both men and women, looked on with glee. I thought the whole episode was disgraceful and hardly worth a TV item.

Earlier last month, we had the spectacle of singer Udit Narayan’s wife (also in Patna) stationing herself outside the locked door of a hotel room in which her husband and his illegally married second wife were hiding.

The TV channels went to town on her accusations, her knocks on the locked door and then followed it up with her husband (Udit’s) flight to Mumbai. On a slightly better level, the wife appealed to the top woman’s organisation in the state of Bihar and it became a slightly more dignified issue with the women’s organisation summoning the husband, who failed to appear at least twice.

Again, except that viewers might have been interested in whether women’s organisations can be affective in such cases, to make a long news item of the woman’s vigil outside the hotel door and her accusations against her husband went on for too long. It seemed a complete waste of time as well as left a very bad taste in the mouth.

I am, like most mediapersons, completely against the proposed censorship of TV channels by the government. But equally I feel the channels themselves should unite and draw up a code of conduct based on self-control.

I have been very impressed by the expertise and the openness with which both ISRO and TV channels covered the failure of INSAT 4-C and earlier failure of another launch of Agni-III only the day before. The head of ISRO, G Madhavan Nair, was frank and put the failure into the perspective of 12 earlier successful launches. He said it was certainly a failure but did not warrant panic.

The two English channels, NDTV and CNN IBN, both devoted most of the late afternoon after the failed launch to a post-mortem. NDTV’s Royden D’Souzas has specialised in coverage of our space programme and he was joined by Pallava Bagla from a science magazine. CNN-IBN, on its part, had its man in Sriharikota to give the first-hand accounts of the launch and its failure.

NDTV had the advantage in anchoring with Vishnu Som, who has specialised in defence matters, while CNN-IBN had a generalist anchor who, fortunately, kept to her own limits. The instant analysis on our media and the openness of discussion was on the same open lines which NASA adopts when faced with crises. And that is how it should be in a democracy.

I am glad many channels had time to devote some attention to the arrival of the monsoon. NDTV did a long and sustained programme on the joy that the monsoon brings, in visuals, sound and music.