Opinion Mumbai Central

On Thursday evening,Zee News announced two hours of tragic Sanjay Dutt,nonstop,plotting the route from nayak-ness to khalnayak-hood. Well,that’s the Hindi news for you,I thought,until I found Times Now clocking up even more time. In fact,through that evening,it was hard to tell which channel you were on,the programming was so eerily identical. Zee News and Times Now were even airing the ad for a new cellphone in unison. You could flip the remote and not lose a fraction of a second of the commercial. And as you switched,you could not but wonder at the total exclusion of the story of Yakub Memon’s life,which is no less morally instructive than that of Sanjay Dutt.

But Memon’s life would have screen value only in the hands of Ram Gopal Verma. Zee valued the imminent loss to the film industry in the region of Rs 1500 crore,though Dutt’s half-dozen current projects,some of which may get iced,do not add up to that figure. However,guests on Sahara Samay — whose Sahara Shri wishes to debate certain financial differences with SEBI on a neutral channel,where he proposes to buy airtime— used rich and valuable terms to describe Dutt’s tragedy,including the beguiling maskarapan and the pleasantly raffish faltugiri.

On Times Now,the hors d’oeuvres was a half-hour with people connected to show biz. It would have been much easier to follow if the host had not been on chummy first name terms with most of them and if their full names had been captioned. Outside Mumbai,few viewers would be familiar with the people on the show —former film magazine editors,film writers,fashion designers and political talking heads. Like Shaina NC,for instance. — I don’t follow her,though I was once a big fan of the gnomic writings of her father Nana Chudasama,which he used to publish on a banner above the Mumbai restaurant (Not Just) Jazz by the Bay. This one remains imprinted on my memory: ‘In the empire of rats,bandicoots will be kings.’ That day,the central government had made itself ridiculous in some unusually imaginative way.

In an unusually gentle archival interview,which CNN-IBN aired after the Supreme Court verdict,Dutt had told Karan Thapar of his typical day in jail – tea and breakfast at 5:30 in the morning,making wickerwork furniture from nine,and a lot of prayer to fill the rest of the day. On Times Now,Dalip Tahil in his startling Bhaag Milkha Bhaag crop — he used to be like a walking,talking,emoting Brylcreem ad — wondered what public purpose would be served by his incarceration,while Shaina,following the party line,pointed out that the real kingpins of Mumbai’s tragedy were living comfortably in Pakistan. The TV channels canvassed for sympathy for Dutt and often found it,from people who seem to feel that the law has gone for the low-hanging fruit,not the perpetrators who matter.

pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com