Of Ghazals, food and fast bucks

TV REVIEW

Channel surfer

By

Randeep Wadehra

Unwittingly, media reports juxtapose the magnificence of human spirit against the scabby all-grabbing mindset, which we fail to notice. Most of us must have already forgotten Prema Jayakumar – a Mumbai auto-rickshaw driver’s daughter who had topped the All India Chartered Accountants Exams in January this year. We may have even completely missed a news item on CNN-IBN this Friday pertaining to Shivakumar, a 23-year-old lad from Bangalore who has made it to IIM Calcutta. A truck driver’s son, Shivakumar is the only educated member in his family. For the past decade, he has been getting up at 4 am, delivering newspapers to various houses and doing other part-time jobs in the evening to finance his studies. He cracked the CAT in his first attempt and became an engineer. Now he is headed for the country’s top B-School. On Aaj Tak, there were success stories of two girls from Madhya Pradesh. Srushti Tewari, a visually challenged Class 12 student, topped the State in Higher Secondary Board exams while Poonam Dhore – whose mother is an Aanganwadi worker and father a laborer on daily wages – topped the High School Board Exams. However, such news items get only a few seconds of media exposure. Overwhelming seismic events and volcanic verbiage related to wrongdoings in high places bury these positive sagas of struggle and success.

Even as CNN-IBN’s Rajdeep Sardesai was explaining how people wanted Manmohan Singh to quit, NDTV’s Barkha Dutt reported that Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh had scotched all rumors about any rift between them. Meanwhile, the IPL real-time serial took some riveting twists, with the media reporting the emergence of rivalry between Mumbai and Delhi cops, the sacking of Pakistani umpire Asad Rauf, and the focus shifting to BCCI boss Srinivasan’s son-in-law Meiyappan Gurunath aka Guru. His long trek to surrender before the law was assiduously covered by media, with each channel displaying “exclusive visuals.”

Sleaze and violence have become ubiquitous on our news channels. It is painful to watch well-heeled people stooping to make that extra buck which they do not really need. Easy money is more addictive than any narcotic discovered or concocted so far. If a few telephone calls to and from a few fat cats can fetch extra lakhs, where is the problem? Or so thought Vindoo Dara Singh, and the aptly named Guru. Fed up with these nonstop shenanigans you take a break and surf non-newsy, non-soapy channels.

One stumbled onto NDTV Classics (NDTV Profit), which has been featuring shows that had become quite popular in the past; like, Chhupa Rustam wherein a hidden camera would record real reactions of real people, which used to be delightfully funny then; now, too, it is delightfully amusing.

Channels like ETV Urdu and DD Urdu, despite all their drawbacks, assure you that the world is not exactly going bonkers. The old world charm of mushairas, the lilting notes of ghazals and the scintillating rhythms of qawwalis act like balm on one’s tortured soul – tortured by all that wickedness playing out in the lanes and by-lanes, fields and hamlets, of Bharat that is India. Then there are other channels like Fox Traveler where chefs from different countries, including India’s Vineet Bhatia, display their culinary skills. On one occasion, Bhatia had taken us to Puducherry – the erstwhile Pondicherry – promising to introduce us to the local cuisine. We ended up watching him eat French breakfast sans croissants. Must be tasty, but not my scene really. One recalls Chef Sanjeev Kapoor’s shows on Zee TV, not so much for the content’s richness as for his toothy smile and the metallic resonance of his voice that mixed recipe’s details with homegrown humor. One could close one’s eyes and visualize him concocting various mouth-watering dishes. Today, the only food show that we desi foodies can relate to is Vinod Dua’s Zaika India Ka (NDTV). Every week a different town, a different language and a different set of culinary delights impel us to watch the show regularly. After sampling a dish, his verdict invariably is “bahut umda”. So is his show.

Published in The Financial World dated May 27, 2013