Guns and posers

At two and a half hours, the film is too long but builds up a strong case against free access to weapons. It argues that a fear psychosis is responsible for the highest number of gun deaths in USA by contrasting it with a Canadian city just across the border, where there is a high incidence of gun possession, high unemployment and people who love to watch violent films but live with their front doors open. The difference, according to Moore, is that Canadian politicians and media, unlike American, do not revel in violence.

A facile and unoriginal conclusion but it strikes a chord: the Indian media lives off violence like it is a vitamin pill; there are sponsored shows devoted to the most gory and bizarre crimes—and don’t we just enjoy the camera lingering on bodies (militants, Veerappan’s, Phoolan Devi’s); also, had you watched Rakesh Sharma’s Final Solution, you would know how politicians incite and invite violence.

Last Hour on Flight 11 (Discovery) was perhaps made to reveal the heroism of attendants on the American Airlines flight that would crash into the WTC—it is largely reconstructed on the basis of their phone calls to ground control; in the process it presents a time line account of how the plane was hijacked (easily)—the actor playing Atta bore him a strong resemblance—and recounts events in the air and on the ground before the attack. Frightening.

So to the day, the box-wallahs salute themselves. The Indian Telly Awards (Sony) may not have possessed pomp and glory, but they had Jassi. And Pari and Mallika and Sujal and Kashish, to mention not Mr Bajaj (without streaked hair), Babuji and Praful and the redoubtable Ekta ‘K’ Kapoor. Pari thanked ‘‘the big man up there’’ (God), Praful, closer home, his mother, and Mr Bajaj his good fortune that television (a.k.a. Ekta) had rescued him from Bollywood anonymity. Mallika was grateful to everyone but especially ‘Jitendra’, by whom she didn’t mean Ekta’s film star father but our very own Jassi.

Jassi was on display most because a) she was the winner of the night and b) the show was on Sony. She belied our expectations by not thanking her wig, spectacles, braces for her award. Three comments: actors don’t need to accept the awards like they’re death sentences; TV actors need to take dancing lessons; and the theme songs of the winning serial should play for winners rather than Telly’s theme song.

Lastly, where the judges of Indian Idol (Sony) were rude, even obnoxious, in the first rounds, they now drip sweetness like a honeycomb; they are now unabashedly admiring and provide little insight to the comparative (de)merits of a contestant. Suddenly, those ‘‘average’’ performances have become superlative: wonderful, never heard better, we have found the next playback singer…Hello? This is not fun. However, maybe the judges flatter to deceive, that or they don’t want to influence their judgement—in which case what are they doing there?