Maybe its the power of the mother tongue,but Hindi channels usually package dramatic events more compellingly than their Angrez peers. Sachin ka sanyas was IBN7s caption for the big sport story of the week. P7 trumped it with Bhagwan ka sanyas. Meanwhile,the English lot were content with,Sachin announces retirement after 200th Test. Is that any way to treat a living god?
Just before Tendulkar mania swept the news,there was a brief window of opportunity for Nobel mania,televisions annual rite of homage to the intellectual life,which it ignores with religious fervour for the rest of the year. This year was special because Peter Higgs and Francois Englert were awarded the physics prize for independently postulating the existence of the Higgs boson in 1964. Special,because you cant utter the word boson in India without setting off the nationalists.
It happened like this: Bose was passed over for the Nobel that he clearly deserved but so were other influential quantum physicists. Peers like Albert Einstein,Niels Bohr and Sir CV Raman had been luckier. However,Bose has a higher honour than a mere prize. The boson,one of only two classes of elementary particles which make up the universe,permanently embeds his name in the history of physics. The other is the fermion,named after Enrico Fermi,one of the creators of the atomic bomb. These terms were coined by Paul Dirac,the father of antimatter. If nationalists knew of this context,maybe they would stop yowling about the Nobel denied.
It isnt just scientists who find the media circus funny. Narayan Sais counsel finds it hilarious that the TV channels keep counting the hours since the lookout notice was issued against the much-loving godboy. In his India News show,Deepak Chaurasia had brought on an unstoppable and pop-eyed babaji,an apologist for Asaram and his son. A natural preacher,he was in such spate that they had to mute him out every now and then,so that others could be heard. Accused by a journalist on the show of running a media trial,and urged to come back to his originality his embryonic state,presumably Chaurasia looked exhausted,unshaven and highly successful,as he usually does these days. One misses his originality,the younger self that had a whale of a time being dribbled like a basketball by the Great Khali.
Meanwhile,in a truly extraordinary exclusive,Times Now was trying to play middleman in the Delhi Assembly election. With trademark confidence,it announced itself as the official forum for a public debate between Arvind Kejriwal and Sheila Dikshit. Theres a stiff dose of jiggery-pokery at work here. The channel spliced together causally unrelated footage of Arvind Kejriwal saying that he had been demanding a debate for months,and Dikshit saying that she needed to know more before she could comment. The Queensberry rules remain unwritten,the ring is dark and forlorn and no one is coming out of their corners fighting. But typically,on the basis of nothing at all,Times Now believes it has taken control of the Delhi election.
pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com
