Skip to main content

It happens only in India - News

Disclaimer: The posts on this series have nothing to do with a similarly named program appearing on Fox History and Entertainment.

I generally do not get to watch a lot of TV in the hostel. Most of the time, the TV room is occupied by some spineless jerks good friends who like to spend their time watching the latest music videos (with more of a visual rather than an auditory remix), or some older people (read hostel workers) who like to watch nothing other than Hindi movies from the 1970s/80s, which is perhaps the stupidest era of Bollywood. And when there is a cricket match, as is now, the TV room is hijacked by cricket fans, almost the entire hostel. That coupled with the extreme peer pressure to not be labelled a hopeless nerd means that I barely get to watch my favourite programs on National Geographic or Discovery channels.

I also like to watch the news sometimes. However, of late, I have been less and less impressed with the news too. I believe that there is less of news and more of lobbying. Debates too are extremely biased. Earlier, when Rajdeep Sardesai used to host the Big Fight on NDTV, the debates were extremely charged, interesting, and informative. Right now, the Big Fight conducts SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the Indian cricket team. Switch to another news channel, Times Now, and you shall see the lawyer, jury, judge, executioner, all-in-one combo Arnab Goswami. His style of conducting debates is simple, in case you have a view that matches his, then you get to speak, else, he is going to %$6% &*!@ %#&*.

But the last straw comes in when I turn to the entertainment channels, and see an advertisement. In the advertisement, a certain lady comes in with a haircut which she claims is the latest style of her favourite TV actress. When her friends ask her (in a mocking manner) about the source of this information, she points them to Star News, and the program सास बहु और साजिश, and the advertisement ends with a Star news, आपको रखे आगे, which translates to Star news, keeps you ahead. Amazing! Speaks volumes of the intellectual levels of those watching that particular news channel.

Maybe I should recommend you to watch सनसनी. This is possibly the most retarded show on news channels, where everyone's bloodlust is satisfied. The show features reporter reporting the most gruesome crimes, in a manner as if he was narrating the story of a thriller. Perhaps the narrator of the thriller may show a little more concern for the lives and deaths of the fictional characters involved.

I might have gone on and on, save for the fact that I do know when to turn off the idiot box. Who can watch news channels after such scum that exists? Hence, I may be woefully ignorant about other silly news programs.

Seriously, if we have such news channels in our country, then Cyrus Broacha's spoof, The Week That Wasn't seems the only bearable program on the news channels.

Keep watching for more posts on things that would happen, to the best of my knowledge, only in India.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Harry Potter and why I dislike the series

There could not be a better time for this post. There could not have been a worse time for this post. Now that the penultimate movie of the series is out, and my facebook wall filled with people who loved the movie. But this is something I really wanted to say, and I shall say it anyway. Harry Potter is pathetic literature. Now, you must be wondering why I say that. There are many reasons. Firstly, the storyline itself is flawed. When a writer sits down to write anything, he/she must set up some essential rules about what is happening. These rules must remain constant irrespective of how many times he/she changes his/her mind. This is so that the readers are allowed to have some sensibility in what they are reading. In the fourth book, Rowling goes ahead and kills Cedric. Then, at the end of the book, the horseless carriages are there again. Nothing special. We all knew that they are horseless. But then comes the fifth book, and BAM, the horses are actually winged beasts that only thos...
18 comments
Read more

On the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard

This is a post that I have been meaning to write from quite some time. Long hours spent typing code on my computer left my hands fatigued, and left me with a lot of pain in my wrists and fingers. That is when I decided to use the Dvorak. But I have got the same bad habit as Dr. Watson, to tell a story backwards. Of course, you must be wondering what the Dvorak is. The story of keyboards starts with the invention of the typewriter. Christopher Sholes, the inventor of the typewriter, tried with a two row piano style keyboard. But then, he got into many difficulties with the design. Then he finally settled for a four row design. This was similar to the QWERTY layout that most computers and typewriters today possess. The engineers at Remington, to whom Sholes had presented his design modified the layout a little further, and then the QWERTY was born. As typewriters became popular, people got used to the layout, and started practising touch typing, i.e. typing without looking at the keys...
Post a Comment
Read more

The paradox of government

I'm fascinated by the concept of government, and the paradoxes it presents. On one hand, governments grant us a certain set of rights or liberties. On the other hand, they work to strip us of the very liberties they promise. Now, I don't mean that all governments strip people of liberties, but there are liberal regimes, and there are sufficiently restrictive and dictatorial ones. Both models may have results to show, it does not mean that people in a restrictive regime are unhappy (refer to Dan Dennett's TED talk , where he states that ideas or memes can be dangerous when taken from one part of the world, where they are widespread, and, using the virus analogy, where people are immune to the memes; to a part of the world where they are foreign, where people may not be immune to the memes and where people may get infected). History has shown that people were sufficiently satisfied with autocratic governments with a benevolent dictator, and that people in other parts of the ...
Post a Comment
Read more