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It
is not really good for your soul to wonder long and hard and
seriously about television. Perhaps it is far better to stay passive,
let the medium wash over you, and sleep over what you have seen. And
simply repeat the process the next day. In TV land, especially in TV
news land, vagueness, grey areas, subtleties, nuanced positions are
simply not acceptable. The medium demands you to take a yes or no
position. George Bush’s now infamous maxim — if you are not for us,
you are against us — applies well to TV today, which demands
positions, perhaps because it feels that its viewers expect it.
Take the case of China, for instance, and its supposed transgressions. Depending on which channel you are watching, China is either a territorial bully, spreading its tentacles into a ‘passive’ India by crossing the LAC and violating air space, or it is a neutral neighbour, innocent of all mala fide intentions of entering into Indian territory without guile. Personally, I am not sure where I stand on the debate. If I agree with the Times Now’s line, I should be frothing at the mouth against those evil Chinese whose intent to snipe at India’s sovereignty is clearly outlined. These days anchor Arnab Goswami has simply replaced Pakistan with China as the network’s favourite punching bag. That is why we repeatedly saw strong visuals of the People’s Liberation Army marching in formation, or of images of Chinese entering Ladakh, leaving rocks marked in Cantonese. And finally, the most telling, Goswami looking pained as he asked no one in particular, "What is going on? " Helping his argument was a retired Army commander and in-house defence analyst, Maroof Raza, whose greatest talent is to sum of complicated arguments simply and forcefully. Academician Alka Arya from Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University tried to swim against the tide but hers was a doomed mission. Times Now had decided China was the bad guy, though there were no official comments or confirmations. Adding to the noise level was CNN-IBN’s evening news show, Face the Nation. Sadly, again the same old arguments and the same old faces were being trotted out. Only the country was different. G. Parthasarthy, former Foreign Secretary and permanent Pakistan basher, was now critically evaluating China’s wrongdoings, while defence analyst Raja Menon was giving his take on how to handle the "rogue" super power. However, if you wanted a completely different perspective, you needed to surf the same evening to NDTV India. Here correspondent Uma Shankar Singh was keeping peace. In a special report, he was getting a feedback from the Indian Army about China’s alleged misdoings in Ladakh. The armed forces bottom line: China’s perceived incursions were really because of the British, and their thickly drawn McMahon Line, which allowed 2 to 3 km variation along the LAC. So, in short, there was nothing to worry about. But for me as a viewer this was no illumination of any inconvenient truth; no dispassionate deconstruction; in fact, no grain of an interesting idea which could have been built into an intelligent analysis. Which ever channel you saw, it was a skewered one-sided picture with strange extrapolations and innuendos. Why can’t the disparate world’s journalism blend with expert academic opinion to give a complete picture? It is very easy for TV critics to pontificate over the degenerate world of reality shows. By the way, Sach ka Samna is drawing to an end shortly but you have to see Fear Factor, Level Two to realise how low reality TV can go, and still get bored. Fear Factor, Level Two says kingpin and show anchor Akshay Kumar is double the danger, double the fun and, yes, according to me, it is also double the rubbish. The show has a bunch of female celebs like Mandira Bedi, Roza, Saif Ali Khan’s ex and model Jesse Randhawa in Cape Town doing the impossible. The first show had the group untying yellow ribbons while being sprayed with high-pressured jets of water. And then they went onto interact with earthworms. Now on to my favourite channel, Lok Sabha TV. This week I happened to catch an excellent slice of life in Kashmir in a series they are airing called Unlimited India. This week’s feature focussed on a Kashmiri wedding. It was so charming to see a Kashmir not battling bullets and killings but dealing with wazwans and wedding receptions.
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