Story time, folks

While watching ‘news’ channels, you’re not sure what you are watching. Sometimes, it’s sports (whenever anyone, including cricketers, are playing games); sometimes it’s a reality show (when cricketers travel through Mumbai or Delhi in an open air bus); sometimes it’s mythology (when a new Ramayan site is discovered in Sri Lanka). Most of the time, it’s a song and dance about everything — more often nothing. These days, it’s all about Khali, a gigantic wrestler of a man whose one thigh is wider than a 22 inch TV screen.

Above all, it is what passes for entertainment. Not the 12 o’clock, one o’clock or any other clock ‘news’.

We can’t tell which Hindi ‘news’ channel offers maximum ‘entertainment’ but certainly, last week, Star News provided the most startling and unedifying spectacle. On Tuesday, judgment was delivered in the Shivani Bhatnagar murder case. R.K. Sharma and three others were found guilty of her murder. That night, Star News fictionalised the crime with extraordinary bad taste and dialogues/actions straight out of a Z-grade Bollywood flop.

Here’s a sample:

A young woman, supposedly Shivani, visits what is supposedly the PMO where R.K. Sharma’s look-alike is admiring a file like it’s Playboy magazine.

RK character: Come, sit, tell me what’s going on?

Shivani character: Dhamake ki khabar.

RK: (plaintively): You come here only for news?

(He hands over a file labeled St. Kitts in capital letters.)

Shivani: Wow! Thank you Ravi.

RK: Sirf thank you?

Shivani: Now, now, you’ve become very naughty.

Next morning Shivani is shown glowing a lovely pink, framed between roses, sent by her ‘naughty’ admirer.

Next scene: Restaurant.

RK: What are you doing tonight?

Shivani: I am at home

RK: Come with me to party.

Scene: Bedroom. Shivani in bed with a magazine and a baby who is large enough to be two years old. Makes a phone call.

RK: Hallo?

Shivani: Where are you?

RK: Congrats on the kid.

Shivani: I have given birth to a child and you are not happy? Why are you ignoring me?

The strains of a piano take over with what sounds suspiciously like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

And so it continues right until the murder.

Star News has a vivid imagination. In its hands a murder became a one-hour tawdry, tabloid tale. Our objection is not that it recreated the crime, but that it did it so in such an ugly fashion. If you must recreate, do so with newspaper clippings and photographs from the time, interspersed with interviews with those who were involved in the investigation or were close to those involved. Discovery Channel does that. Don’t use people pretending to be actors pretending to act like real people in situations that don’t look real at all.

Above, all, if you must imagine history, do so like Jodhaa Akbar. In which case, make a film.

So we say to News 24: make or break news, don’t make it up.

shailaja.bajpai@expressindia.com