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This is an archive article published on March 27, 2010
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Opinion Red chilli in hot oil

News TV balle,balle,India,thalle,thalle....

indianexpress

Saubhik Chakrabarti

March 27, 2010 11:27 PM IST First published on: Mar 27, 2010 at 11:27 PM IST

News TV reportage and IPL—like dried red chillies and hot cooking oil. You add the first to the second and you get crackling,sputtering noises,steam,basically an aurally and visually challenging environment. I can’t get out of the kitchen,of course. My professional duties vis-a-vis this column means every now and then I brave the sputter,the crackle and the steam. But,and as any good cook will tell you,there are chillies and chillies. This season,the hottest chilli is Times Now. This is not to suggest NDTV and CNN-IBN IPL shows are exercises in meditative contemplation. But at Times Now,grown-up men have discovered the child in themselves and the point to note is that news TV editorial planning is always more indulgent than parental supervision.

Summer Slam,Times Now’s very Times Now-like christening of its IPL programming,is more or less bedlam. Turn the sound off and watch Navjot Singh Sidhu and Times Now’s regular sports commentator. I have never seen so many teeth so many times on one show on news TV.

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Frenetic hand movements. Turn on the sound. The clichés,oh man. And the counter clichés. And the jokes. The Times Now anchor for the show pops up now and then but he’s clearly in amateur league compared to the panelists. The anchor tells Sidhu it’s not balle,balle for you today,Sidhu says,it’s thalle,thalle,my friend. The chatter—this is a very conservative way of describing what goes on in Times Now’s IPL show— is accompanied by a background music —this,too,is a very conservative way of describing what you hear. Would you call what sounds like sticks on up turned tins music? I have discovered that I can take about four minutes of Summer Slam in one sitting. After that,yes,I can’t get out of the kitchen,but I pick a different chilli.

Live-in relationships. A hot button social issue? Not for me,a reflexive libertarian. I mean,what’s there to debate. But there’s a debate and there’s evening talk TV as one of the forums. And so on CNN-IBN,the anchor asks whether elite women create an image trap by wearing excessively short clothes and by smoking and drinking. Okay,the anchor was playing the provocateur,useful in talk TV. But why exactly should smoking,and drinking and wearing short clothes figure in a debate on live-in relationships is something only CNN-IBN can explain. Women who smoke and drink don’t get married? Or non-smoking,teetotaler women don’t have live-in relationships? I am obviously a far poorer observer of Indian society than CNN-IBN is.

How fitting therefore that the panelist supposedly representing the ‘socially conservative’ point of view should

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argue at one point that live-in relationships are problematic because men will then live-in here,live-in there,with different women. You sometimes wonder whether Indian society is prepared for Indian news TV. News TV has created an intellectual paradigm our society can’t create at this point of time,probably will never be able to.

News TV balle,balle,Indian society,thalle,thalle—if I may borrow from Navjot Singh Sidhu.

saubhik.chakrabarti@expressindia.com