Opinion Onion Satta
And Rahul Gandhis hit-and-run gamble,among other oddities.
No,I am not going to write about General VK Singh. Perish the thought. That stuff goes on the front page and op-ed. No,Im not going to repeat the droll story the general told Arnab Goswami about the Indian police,the Japanese emperor and his lost poodle. Last I heard,it was a homely fable concerning the Bihar police,a tiger and a rabbit,but theres no stopping globalisation. And I wont tell you about the mysterious babu from Lucknow or the generals intriguing question: Funding ministers means what?
But what I must tell you is that if you missed that edition of Newshour,you missed something jaw-dropping. Even the host was slack-jawed at the allegations flying about his studio and going,Just a sec,just a sec as he rallied to keep up. How humanising this role reversal was. No longer did the nation want to know. Only Arnab Goswami wanted to know. He craved to know. He would do anything to know. He would even become measured,careful,circumspect,laying a perfect trap for the general to walk into. This was a different kind of Newshour,not the usual shower of howler monkeys with Goswami playing fight director.
But hang on,I wasnt going to tell you about generals. I was going to tell you about onions,or the absence thereof at the BJPs maha-jamboree in Bhopal. Digvijaya Singh had turned it into a numbers game and ABP News had Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi disparaging the Congress for snooping about in markets,trying to find out skullcap and burqa sales figures.
From talking figures,TV moved on to speak volumes. After estimating five lakh visitors,half a lakh of them Muslims,ABP News dived into the field kitchens which would feed them,where a production line was churning out sabzi-poori in industrial quantities. Stores lay heaped all over everything but onions. Onion and garlic-free sattvik diet for the five-rupee faithful?
Not quite. Zee,which had run an interesting story on the digital publishing infrastructure on location,also investigated the kitchens to read out even the brands of oil and ghee in use. The camera roved over stacks and mounds of produce,including pans of carefully skinned garlic. But no onions at all.
The onion action was in Ghaziabad,where the local Pearls TV channel reported serial arrests in wholesale markets for pyaaz ki sattebaazi. After hours,onion traders were turning bookies. Except that instead of the position of Sreesanths towel,they were taking bets on the opening price of onions the next morning. And then rigging those prices to make a double killing.
The double attack in J&K was reported from the front by Times Nows Pradeep Dutta in his impressive flak jacket (the people around him were in ill-fitting terycot shirts),who claimed that the forces would give the media access after checking the corpses of the terrorists for booby traps. Embarrassingly for him,Headlines Today had been showing pictures of the dead for an hour. Which was excessive,too think of the families. Times Now fed greedily on the Opposition-led uproar about the killings and highlighted a Twitter hashtag: #callofftalks. This is the new echo chamber,with anchors and viewers ricocheting between TV and social media.
And then,of course,Rahul Gandhi elected to talk out of the box,with a hit-and-run soundbyte at the Press Club. Times Now immediately labelled it a crisis of credibility for the government. Actually,it looked like a clever gambit to counter the BJPs latest lauha purush with a candidate who appears to be independent of the party line. Appears is the operative word,of course.
pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com
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