Punjabi Antenna
Hockey’s fall from grace
Randeep Wadehra

Hockey has certainly lost out on popularity stakes vis-`E0-vis cricket and even tennis. This became clear when no sponsor came forward for the Dharam Singh Memorial Hockey Tournament. While talking to Ritesh Lakhi on Guftagu, PTC News’ walk ‘n’ talk show, Pargat Singh—a hockey icon and Director of Sports, Punjab— minced no words as he enumerated neeyat di kami (dishonourable intentions), lack of vision, wrong policies and bad management as main reasons for the game’s fall from grace.

Watching newsreaders on different channels is quite an experience. Apart from faithfully following the basics like correct pronunciation, voice modulation, posture and facial expression, every newsreader adds, or should add, a personal touch that makes viewing tolerable enough. If you are watching DD Jalandhar/ Punjabi (one has yet to decipher the logic behind the twin names for this channel), you will be at the receiving end of a soporific monotone that doesn’t discriminate between a cricket match and a road accident. This majestic tonal detachment acquires profundity when you find the small screen graced by elderly newsreaders who used to be tolerably young in the 1980s. As for the content, it remains a sarkari documentary as it was when it was first set up in 1979.

Zee Khabran, on the other hand, does have pretty faces—young and not so young. But most of them are so straight-faced that they probably wouldn’t smile even at a Santa-Banta joke. But a couple of their reporters do come up with witticisms as one noticed in a report on the Mohali SSP Khatra’s replacement with Aulakh, post-IPL match controversy. PTC News, on the other hand, has young and smart newsreaders and reporters. But sometimes things go a bit awry. While discussing the forthcoming state Assembly elections in Rajasthan in the context of the BJP’s victory in Karnataka, a reporter described these as Twenty20 matches and the Lok Sabha elections as World Cup.

In this cricket analogy where would ODIs and Test matches fit in, one wonders. And how would one describe panchayat and zila parishad elections? Gulli danda and kabaddi contests, perhaps? The latter would be a more appropriate simile, given the propensity for strong-arm tactics among political parties.

One wonders whether different channels’ correspondents access different officials for the same event. There was this accident in Sangrur in which two labourers got buried in a pit they were digging. In their afternoon bulletins, telecast simultaneously with near-identical visuals, while Zee Khabran reported that there was no official confirmation of their deaths, PTC News reported that the deaths were officially confirmed.