TELEPROMPT
Party time for channels
Mannika Chopra

Another week, another earthquake. At least for the BJP. Last week, senior leader Jaswant Singh’s rather cavalier expulsion from the party dominated the headlines, and this week Arun Shourie’s Walk the Talk with Shekhar Gupta on NDTV 24 X7 left TV viewers gagging and wondering what next. In between, Sudheendra Kulkarni, close aide to LK Advani, also put in his papers.

What a time television news has had. Social historians might label this era the age of personalities but television historians — yes, there is such a thing — will call it the age of sound bites. After his unceremonious ouster, Jaswant Singh, former Minister for Finance, Defence and External Affairs, always known to be articulate despite his languid demeanour, gave the mother of all sound bites. "From Hanuman I have become a Ravan," said Singh, emotionally wallowing in an aura of attention, and stressing his 30-year-old association with the party.

It had to be last week’s most quotable quote. This week, Singh’s imagery was replaced by Shourie’s. Every time he articulated his distress over the current dispensation in the BJP to Gupta as they walked through lush lawns, out popped a buzzword. It was quite funny actually. The saffron party and its leaders, who pride themselves on their Indian identity, over the course of this particular interaction, were described variously as "Alice in Blunderland," "Humpty Dumpty" and "Tarzan."

No wonder the interview had great boxoffice appeal, and the terms were quoted and flashed as breaking news across umpteen news channels, leaving, perhaps, aside the larger point that Shourie was trying to put across. Come to think of it, this sound bite infection seems to be spreading across all genres. This is what is picked up by TV to describe a complex thought, a trend or an idea and, sadly, maybe even knowingly, it is being used increasingly by people who are being interviewed to gain that extra publicity mileage.

In an interview to Shewta Rajpal on NDTV, Nandan Nilekani, who has just taken over a project that promises to provide identity numbers to India’s billion plus population, described himself as a plumber, putting the nuts and bolts of a project together, rather than a grand policy man. Sure enough, the term was used as a heading in the channel’s website. These days it is all about pithy presentation and that catchy, smart turn of phrase, never mind if it sounds a little out of place with the issue at hand, or is something the person being interviewed would normally not say.

Looking back in history, it is true that the great political orators have always used their verbal dexterity to put an idea or a thought across. Who can ever forget Winston Churchill’s "I have nothing to give you except blood, sweat and tears," or John F. Kennedy’s "Ask not what America can do for you but what you can do for America," or closer home, and surely the most memorable of speeches, Jawaharlal Nehru’s "Tryst With Destiny" address on the eve of India’s Independence.

Those days they were not called sound bites but eloquence and unparalleled expression of thought, adding lustre to the quality of public debate and thought. Television has destroyed all that. Its need for quickie heroes has created television politicians for a television age. In the process, some politicians appear to have lost their power of conviction; for them politics has becomes a career rather than a crusade.

Even venerable leaders and certified intellectuals have succumbed to the temptation of over-summarising information down to bites for the twitter generation. So it was sad to see a person of Shourie’s erudition to resort to such jolly catch phrases, and for panellist Swapan Das Gupta to counter Shourie’s imagery by reciting a nursery rhyme. All this over simplification is no doubt a loss to public life. In an age where personality politics dominates, there has been an emasculation of political personalities.

Another big-ticket talk show has been unleashed this week with Farah Khan’s Tere Mere Beech Mein on Star Plus. I have always had a soft corner for this Khan; she just looks like a nice person who won’t put people down. As yet, I have only seen one episode of the show with Salman Khan and his mother but somehow it is not clicking. Basically, the whole thing is too filmy and rich for my digestion. The set is too happening — it looks like something from Om Shanti Om — and Khan herself wears some strange designer jewellery that looked like handcuffs hanging from her neck.

As for the interview itself, if you are not revolted by the thought of a 40-year-old man being a mama’s boy, it might give you a smile and a fuzzy feeling. But if the sight of Salman Khan cuddling his mother and saying he has not married because no woman has come close to what his mother is, makes you balk. It was best to switch to sports.