TELEVISTA
A confusing cricket show
Amita Malik

I am told it has created divisions even among cricket buffs. But speaking as an amateur, and I believe I speak for lakhs, the new line-up of cricket teams has left me not only confused but also resentful. It might be intriguing to find Tendulkar and Jayasurya opening the innings. But then you wonder on whose side you are. Though it is an honour for Rajasthan to have Shane Warne as their stalwart, where does that leave Jadeja? The experts keep on telling us that English football teams and others also follow the same system of mix-ups. Beckham, I believe, has played for many teams. But when it comes to the crunch, he plays most proudly for England.

Having said all that, and having been reduced to watching the individual performances of my favourite players, since there are no regional line-ups left in their original form, let me say that I am glad something has succeeded in rousing the passions of the Indian viewing public after those aroused over the Olympic hoopla.

At this point I must ask a question which has been troubling me for a long time. Why do 75 per cent of the media people, and those outside them, pronounce Olympic as ‘Oh-lum-pic’? I notice that even when it is written in Hindi on the screen, it is written as ‘Oh-lum-pic’ and not Olympic. If the media, on whom lakhs depend for guidance in pronunciation, misleads a whole nation of viewers, I cannot shout ‘long live the media’. It is obvious that with the proliferation of TV channels, professional standards have taken a sharp dip. But if a word as commonly used as Olympic continues to be misused, it will soon go the way of some cricketing terms such as bowling, which has become "balling," and even Kapil Dev and other cricket stars have fallen into the trap.

Having said that, I must raise a strong word of protest against Sony Max, which is behaving worse than Doordarshan in the matter of advertisements. I wish my colleagues of sports columns would back me up in this, but they are possibly out in the field and do not watch matches at home. I am referring to the crude way in which Sony Max, outdoing the other erring channels, is not allowing viewers to see the fall of a wicket in detail because the channel is in so much of a hurry to get four or five long ads in as soon as a wicket has fallen. We have to wait till the new batsman has come in and hit his first ball before we are allowed a replay and an explanation of how the last man got out.

It all started in the bad old days of Doordarshan and has carried over to all the sports channels, which have the firm belief that advertisements take precedence over live action. In this case, the customer comes last.

Getting away from sport, I must mention two programmes which continue to fascinate me, although far different in content. One is Swathi Thyagarajan's ‘Born Wild’. The other is the disturbing but engrossing series of air accidents on National Geographic. But in the end, it shows us the gallantry as well as tremendous skills of the pilots and their crew who fly us, and how many tragic endings have been averted by their presence of mind as well as their innovative skills.

It also shows that by and large passengers behave with courage and obey the instructions of the crew even when they feel their end is near. Some surviving pilots and flight engineers, now retired and old and grey, relive for us those terrible moments and tell us how they finally made a landing under the most adverse conditions. The one I saw last week showed how a pilot, running out of fuel, decided to land his plane in the small landing strip of the small town where he learnt landings. To his horror, when he was about to land, he found it was no longer a landing strip but a public road, and what made matters worse was that two small boys were having a cycling race on it.

But, being the super pilot that he was, he landed the plane on one engine and managed to avoid the two small boys who had, towards the end, decided to race the plane itself. One of the most dramatic moments I have seen on the small screen.