SIGHT & SOUND
The sports reality show
Amita Malik

As far as sports go, nothing is as revealing as television. One not only watches performances but also the expressions on the faces of sportspersons before and after their performances. And as our performances in almost every sports have been disappointing, to say the least, to sit and watch TV becomes a sort of mournful reaction to what has come over sports in India.

The morning (December 12) I am writing this, India has been ranked 8^th at the Asian Games, the lowest yet. I think we were once as high as 4^th. Certainly 5^th. And China’s tally of gold medals alone is 123 at the moment. One of the tennis matches which depressed me the most (apart from the first men’s doubles by Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi when they were at daggers drawn) was watching Sania Mirza and Shikha throw away their match against a Taiwan pair. Shikha seldom got her first serve in, Sania missed sitters at the net, did not always win her service game and both Indian girls offered easy smashes to the alert Chinese girls at the net. The Chinese obviously had a simple game plan, did some easy passing shots after drawing the brash Shikha to the net, and so on and so forth.

Somehow, even when we won medals, mostly silvers and bronzes, it did nothing to cheer us up. As for hockey, the less said the better. But we did feel better when sportspersons, both men and women who were not famous names, did their best. Some made valiant efforts and remained largely unsung. As for those who won golds, shabash to them. I must, however, fault our media for some cruel lapses.

While Sania Mirza hogged the limelight, Saina Nehwal, who has done much better at badminton, has seldom got the same sort of hype. As in the case of film stars, the media have a tendency to splash the stars and offer no encouragement to youngsters coming up and suddenly doing unexpectedly well. As for DD’s TV commentator on tennis in Hindi, his shudh bhasha did not conceal the fact that he thought he was on radio and reporting what everyone could see.

And while on the subject of sport, a number of viewers have expressed their disappointment to me that at the height of the sports season with so many important international and national events taking place, NDTV has replaced its 7.30 p.m. sports programme with something called The Fight for Delhi. They complain that the local items for Delhi’s viewers can well be accommodated as items in its hourly news bulletins. They say that sports viewing is one of the few programmes for healthy family viewing. And to expect schoolchildren and senior members of the family to sit up till 10 p.m. for its now sole sports programme has put them to great distress, as both children and elderly people are in bed by then. NDTV please note this genuine complaint. I think channels sometimes need to forget their TRPs if even a fraction of serious viewers wants something urgently.

It was great to watch Shah Rukh Khan at his press conference. It was better still watching it on TV because I regret to say that some of our younger colleagues, carried away by star worship, ask the silliest adulatory time-wasting questions which are long-winded. And, the lunch which usually follows hardly lets the poor star eat in peace. Anyway, I think Shah Rukh has mastered the art of diplomacy. His comment that Amitabh Bachchan’s shoes were too big for him to fit into set the tone and the fact that he is getting a higher fee than Big B was carefully downplayed. Advertisers have too much at stake and we have to wait for the new year to see how Shah Rukh manages. But I would like to stick out my neck and predict that he will have his own style, he has considerable charm, he is very hardworking and he will pull it off. Uncle will perhaps be replaced by Bhaiyya, and why not?

Tailpiece: Some purists ring me up from time to time to complain that let alone the newscasters from lower ranked channels, even the high and mighty NDTV newscasters and anchors are mispronouncing the most simple words. One of the most common is product, which is pronounced as pro-duct when it should be prod-uct. Then any word beginning with "re" is separated from its next few syllables. Such as reckoning. It is invariably mispronounced as ree-cunning when the dictionary says reck-unning. And it is reckonciliation, not ree-conciliation. It strikes me that in their anxiety to be in the rat race, producers, if any, are either incompetent or forgetting their job of monitoring each and every bulletin, programme and performer. That is what broadcasting is about, because millions and crores of viewers treat the channels in whichever language, as role models when it comes to correct pronunciation. So every channel has a huge responsibility in this matter.