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
20 comments
Read more

ERROR_SUCCESS

ERROR_SUCCESS. This macro would be familiar to all those who have done some programming in WIN32. It is the output of the GetLastError() function to check the thread's last error state when no error has occurred. Weird, isn't it? I mean, if it is a success, then why is it marked as an error in the macro? This is one example of a badly made API. APIs are considered bad when programming in them becomes non-intuitive. Software is said to be bad (or said to suck) when it seems counter-intuitive to the user. There is one very simple example of this. Start notepad. Type in any text. Click on close. The message that you see is: This makes no sense to me as a user. Of course, the programmer follows the approach that he creates a temporary file called Untitled , and in that file he allows the user to make all his changes. But how am I, as a user to understand that? A similar disconnect occurs even between two different programmers. That is why it takes a whole lot of effort to make
2 comments
Read more

Elements of a Story: The Whispers

I'm compelled to begin each post with a meta. That way, my blog posts seem less like essays or dissertations, and more like diary entries, or web logs. So here goes... I started this blog a little over a year ago. The main purpose of this blog was to experiment with styles of writing, and find an effective outlet for all the subjects I wish to rant about; saving my classmates the agony of having to listen to them. As I wrote this blog, I've experimented with so many styles, and have received comments claiming that my work is a shameless copy greatly inspired by so-and-so author/work. Fact is that I simply chanced upon that style. I read, so obviously, my work shall reflect the styles of those I admire, but I've worked out so many styles without even knowing that they exist, only to be informed of them later. Recently, I've been struck with the seeming absence of whispers as an element of a story. The more I've thought of the subject, the more I've been convince
10 comments
Read more