Opinion More Myth than News

Look people,even the RSS accepts the Death of Ravan is more myth than news. Do we really need to be told the context,Headlines Today? Dussehra comes every year. There’s only so much news you can extract out of it. At least this year you could claim that Sonia Gandhi’s appearance at Delhi’s Ramlila grounds to pull a mean bow counts as news,given that she’s been out of the public eye for a while. (At least it presumably squashed the rumours being spread by perennial news-TV favourite Subramanian Swamy that she had been secretly replaced with her sister.) But that’s as far as the news value of the event goes. And so you had to endure human-interest sections that were crashingly unimaginative instead. Seriously,I am beginning to think that a segment about a Ramlila with Muslim actors must have some religious significance,it is trotted out with such ritual care by every news channel every year.

If you want an anniversary less overtly religious but quite as saffron — and where Muslims,cap or not,are considerably less welcome — you could always commemorate the tenth anniversary of Narendra Modi’s assumption of the chief ministership of Gujarat. NDTV’s painfully young reporter from Ahmedabad earnestly explained that his supporters thought he was India’s bestest chief minister ever ever ever and definitely the next PM,while his detractors worried that he had committed genocide — and,after laying out the facts,stepped back and provided Analysis by solemnly intoning: “So,10 years on,a controversial personality who provokes extreme reactions.” No kidding,laddie.

NDTV’s video department didn’t help that segment either: as the reporter explained that Indian capitalism was flocking to Modi’s Gujarat,pictures of various titans of industry at Vibrant Gujarat summits were played,winding up with a long,excruciating clip of Ratan Tata gingerly hugging — Arjun Munda. Where the chief minister of Jharkhand arrived from the middle of that reel,I will never know. I have this image of dank cellars at NDTV with endless shelves of film; a room with a sign saying “Hugs” with thousands of alphabetised tapes on the wall; a lost intern,stumbling in the dark,passing “Tata hugs Modi” — as well as “Tata hugs Moopanar” and “Tata hugs Mukesh” — to settle on the dust-covered casing of the box containing “Tata hugs Munda”. I thank heavens he did,because it was truly extraordinary television. Both men clearly felt they needed to hug for the cameras,but I have never seen a hug simultaneously so enthusiastic and so awkward. But then I never got to see “Tata hugs Mukesh”.

Even no-news news,though,is better than no-news opinion. Everyone had so run out of ideas this week that on NDTV’s The Buck Stops Here,Barkha Dutt’s “newsmaker@10” was Pakistani “writer” Fatima Bhutto — last heard from declaring that: 1. “Samraj” was a recently coined Urdu word,meaning “Rule of Uncle Sam”; and 2. Given that Urdu was a “static language”,the fact that they’d gone out of their way to invent the word samraj showed the Malign Influence of America on Pakistan. Such thoughtfulness and expertise,of course,qualified her instantly for news TV,where Dutt asked her about — the influence of America on Pakistan.

mihir.sharma@expressindia.com