Spare us our daily vision

Worse, they did not rush to join Pravin Togadia in jail! In the good old days, all the news channels would have. And beamed it ‘Live’. Perhaps, they kept their distance this time because they — unlike Pramod Mahajan — believe the trishul is a weapon of mass (media) destruction.

We’ve been put on a low P diet. Politicians find place on the menu after vegetables (trucker’s strike), health (SARS), lifestyle (Sachin go-carting) and Madonna’s American Life in London. Vajpayee and Co. has been degraded. And by ‘‘degraded’’ we mean the opposite of upgraded, not something from the Pentagon’s dictionary of military jargon.

Meanwhile, our calorific intake of crime is being increased. NDTV 24×7, Sahara and Zee, do (or will) devote shows to it. Have we led them to believe we are descendants of Count Dracula with an insatiable thirst for human blood? Else why would they bother?

For a while, there’s been a growing suspicion that news is entertainment. Now we know: NDTV India has a prime time Bollywood show weekdays, Aaj Tak has one on the weekend, NDTV 24×7 gives you a Night Out (hope that’s correct). Dunno about the others because our miserly cable operator refuses us so many news channels.

Headlines Today could so easily have been called Entertainment Today: in the mouths of its charming babes, even SARS sounds funny. It’s a combination of happy smiles, sing-a-long voices and a way with words:. ‘‘So hang around… to find out… who’s been bombed into the Stone Age… who’s doing a Brutus on Saddam… and how the conqueror of Iraq seems to have contracted a mystery virus…’’ Who said bad news has to be sad?

News anchors are confusing us by exchanging places before you can say Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. On NDTV 24×7 there’s Prannoy Roy and his team whom we expect to see on Star News where we see faces we don’t expect to. There’s Dibang, Prasun Vajpayee and Nagma — the faces of Aaj Tak now featuring on NDTV India. Mitali Mukherjee cut her teeth on Doordarshan. Currently, she’s sharpening them on Headlines Today. Nidhi Kulpati used to grace Zee News but now fronts NDTV India while Shireen and Arup look like they’re on Star while anchoring Sahara. It doesn’t help that Sahara and NDTV India have similar logos.

So many changes, so many new ways to be different, such enormous efforts… And still, we’re dissatisfied. We say — hey, hang on a minute, this is all tickety-boo but where’s the news? If we don’t see a politician every two minutes, we begin to experience withdrawal symptoms.

Why blame the channels? Didn’t we complain there was too much politics and too little of everything else? Now, that they’re giving us more of everything else, we want more of politics! Carp, carp.