Opinion Their vanishing playground
A chilling thought for TV news: will there be life after the Commonwealth Games?
At this rate,some countries may still participate in the Commonwealth Games,the athletes may occupy the Commonwealth Games Village without dirt assailing them,Delhi may host the event without terrorists or mosquito attacks,everyone may get to the stadiums via bridges or over-bridges that dont collapse,but the TV news channels wont be there to cover any of it. They will boycott the extravaganza; thats how mad it has made them.
Hardly blame them. They have been scurrying around Delhi for more than a month,in torrential rainfall,to find leaking roofs,incomplete construction sites,mud bath roads,to say nothing of standing in dirty water to measure the height of the rising Yamuna. Then on Tuesday,they had to trudge their way through the rain,the slush to the CWG Village,only to be exposed to the filthy and uninhabitable surroundings,to quote Mike Hoopers description of the Village. How the chief executive of the Commonwealth Games Federation must have made them blush.
No wonder they vented their shame with footage of the Village and its filthy surroundings at great danger to themselves: we saw the mosquitoes drawn magnetically to the TV cameras. Worse,the afternoon witnessed the collapse of the over-bridge near the showpiece Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium and the news channels had to dash across. While nothing befell them,the anchors and reporters sounded more injured than those who were actually wounded in the incident. Live India asked us in clear exasperation: Should we hold the Games? Times Now spoke for all of them (and perhaps us?): Shame for Kalmadi & Co, while NDTV 24×7 had Anurag Thakur of the IOA raging against the money spent on the Games under the banner headline,CWG: Falling Apart?
They were so incensed they got confused. The India TV anchor said 23 people had been injured,but its ticker claimed only four had sustained injuries. And although the TV reporters at the site of the incident were standing so close to each other,a mosquito would have had difficulty buzzing between them,most channels did what News 24 did: claim Xclusive coverage. Hello?
All of this comes after the poor TV reporters found themselves soaking in the Sunday downpour as they had to abandon the holiday for gunfire at Jama Masjid. Attack on Delhi, declared India TV or,as it put it rather more ominously,Dilli par hamla (which sounds much more like a state of war). Then came the threatening e-mail from the Indian Mujahideen (IM),which warned against holding the CWG: Be careful,be alert, the channel counselled. And if we shivered it wasnt only because the temperature in the capital was down to 23 degrees Celsius.
When news came on Tuesday of the filthy Commonwealth Village,you wondered whether IM,known to play dirty,were somehow responsible for it?
But this is no puzzle for exhausted,drenched TV journos. Call in CID (Sony). This most popular TV crime show would have solved the Jama Masjid attack in a jiffy. The empty cartridges discovered by the police would have been taken to the CID super scientific lab. Doctor-sahib would have shot a 9 mm weapon (similar to the one used in the Old Delhi attack) into a tank of water and the bullets would have immediately revealed the identity of the shooter. Detecting a single human hair on the original fired cartridge,an attractive female assistant (please note: always attractive) would then have fed the strand of hair into a computer that can generate a reconstruction of the assailants face. CID solved a murder just so,in a Sunday episode,by exposing a skull to the skilful computer. CID would have matched the image with their CID files and come up with three possible owners of the face and visited each one. Wont reveal more,but they caught the criminal.
ACP Pradyuman & Co.,the country needs you.
shailaja.bajpai@expressindia.com
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