Opinion Consistency is for cretins

CNN-IBN fearlessly asked: was it overhyped,all marketing,no substance? That question was addressed in a pretty decent episode of Face the Nation. (FTN’s usual,prominent,subheading,‘India’s Best Presented News Programme’ had been very pointedly removed. I’m sure that had nothing to do with the fact that on this occasion the person asking the questions for IBN was Bhupendra Chaubey,and not Sagarika Ghose.)

The film’s co-stars,Kareena Kapoor and Arjun Rampal,stonewalled like veteran politicians. Even so,they revealed much. Heavy promotion is justified,insisted Kapoor,“It’s about putting India on the map.” (That might have worked on Times Now.)

Rampal provided particular clarity on why Ra.One was a “great film”,a step forward for Bollywood. “You can create the revenue,” he explained enthusiastically. “Different revenue streams through partnerships… show different revenue streams,different avenues of making revenue. That’s the leap of faith that we make in Ra.One… hopefully it will encourage the industry to make film with larger budgets.” On the film’s actual quality,defiantly: “I like it,I don’t care.”

To his credit,Chaubey wasn’t buying this. “I’m just wondering Arjun. I thought cinema was more about content,” he murmured. But Rampal and Kapoor had no intention of addressing content. Shah Rukh,said Rampal,got “the best technicians in the world to work on the biggest film in the country,to make sure that everyone will go there and see it. He’s a one-man powerhouse.” Brilliant. Hopefully at some point,in between tweeting the poster and arranging to book half the CGI guys in California,SRK got to read the script.

It was good TV when Chaubey asked,desperately,“But where is the plot?” It was great TV when he got Kapoor to reveal Bollywood’s desperate lack of ambition: “What gets the cash registers ringing is song-and-dance,when the hero tries to save the actress…. and we should not try to change that.”

But what makes news TV so special is its ability to simultaneously attack hype,and be part of it. FTN had people trying to shout over the background blare of songs from the movie they were supposedly dissing. But worse,as Ra.One opened,IBN had managed to turn itself from a news channel into a location for tawdry DVD extras. “Khan’s Don 2 creates quite the buzz,” they informed us,and that “On Up Close and Personal with PZ,Shah Rukh Khan shows his marketing skills”. We got treated to apparently endless segments of SRK “picking his all time favourite superheroes”,including Mr India and Shahenshah.

And the premiere in London was the tawdriest DVD extra of all,with swooping music,actiony red-carpet shots,all inside a tiny box,with the largest element of the screen being the Ra.One logo. SRK was allowed to burble on about how he had to “dig deep into the recesses of my acting prowesses,” no doubt for his Tamil accent. Kapoor explained that it was “exciting,because in my previous film I play a college student,and now I play the mother of a ten-year old son.” She sounded mildly panicked about this accelerated ageing process.

But for contradictions within a single sentence,you need the News Hour. Arnab Goswami was personally affronted by suggestions that AFSPA be lifted from parts of Kashmir,and paraded before the Nation angry moustachioed generals to back him up. So interchangeable were his military guests that one was mistakenly addressed as “Shankar Roychowdhury”,when he was actually Shankar Prasad,two men who share not just a first name,but also similar taste in facial hair.

Times Now was simultaneously furious that the National Conference,the state’s ruling party,would say anything about AFSPA; and furious that the army chief was trying to be discreet for once (“Is Army Chief VK Singh avoiding a confrontation by not speaking openly [to us on AFSPA?”).

And Goswami simultaneously insisted that nothing had changed in Kashmir,meaning that previous comments from the NC supporting AFSPA in the past were still valid — and that everything had changed,large numbers of tourists had visited this year,and the NC was being criminally ungrateful to the Indian soldier. News TV’s great minds agree: Consistency,children,is for cretins.

mihir.sharma@expressindia.com