Breaking Down News: The Dhokla Dialogues

Onions have brought tears to the eyes of BJP and Congress governments in Delhi but last Sunday, when Aaj Tak accused Delhi’s AAP government of hatching an onion scam, it rebounded and the channel became the first media victim of Delhi’s most dangerous vegetable. On the basis of an RTI query, Aaj Tak reported that the Delhi government had sourced onions at Rs 18.75 per kg from a small farmers’ consortium run by the central government and sold at Rs 30 per kg. But after a few hours, deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia produced papers showing that the onions had been bought at Rs 32.86 per kg. (An anti-corruption enquiry is in progress.)

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At a time when Delhi’s parks are teeming with elderly gentlemen seething at the price of onions, the story earned a lot of attention but the rebuttal drew raspberries for Aaj Tak, with #AajTakChor trending hard. Presumably, that’s sending up Rahul Kanwal’s Twitter description: @AajTak Anchor.

Undeterred, Aaj Tak’s mothership India Today ran a story titled ‘Delhi roads to witness more traffic in the form of 1,000 new cluster buses’. Which, after uproars and raspberries on social media, appears to have been changed to the much less elitist, ‘Delhi to add 1,000 new cluster buses to meet shortage’. Meanwhile, Aaj Tak remained a glutton for punishment. When encryption briefly became the issue of the day, its anchor persistently referred to it as ‘inscription’. Much hilarity all round again.

In a welcome change of scene, the political debate which India seems to batten on has moved from the raucous television studio to the printed page, and to the delightfully archaic epistolary form. The exchange between Rajdeep Sardesai and Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis reminds one of the genteel time when extraordinarily learned gentlemen in freshly independent India shadow-boxed in the letters columns of The Statesman, using pseudonyms like ‘Twickenham’ and ‘Brown Bomber’. It is not clear who won this full text versus full text contest, but it is generally agreed that debates like this, in which issues are actually discussed and cussing is not on, are infinitely preferable to the freestyle wrestling tournaments seen on the telly. Recently, guests actually beat each other up in a studio but since they were an astrologer and a godwoman, no one cared.

And finally, Narendra Modi has again put his name to some cloth, and this time it is political rather than personal. Debate will rage over the weekend about whether signing off on the national flag constitutes disrespect or good diplomacy. It appears that officials of the ministry of external affairs noticed the transgression and snatched the flag from the hands of celebrity chef Vikas Khanna, who was supposed to give it to Barack Obama. Khanna had to go back to his main function, which was to maintain quality control over the corn dhoklas.

pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com