Economy on centre-stage

ON Budget Day this year, there were no fewer than eight channels analysing the budget within minutes of Mr. Yashwant Sinha completing his speech, not counting any of the regional channels. None of those eight seemed short of advertising either, with Zee News perhaps taking the cake in this respect. Any time one switched to it it seemed, one ran into advertising. What is it that makes this esoteric financial exercise such a presumed viewership draw, on par with election coverage? Clearly the fact that the economy is now centre-stage and affects everybody. It is also more volatile than it used to be. If more people are making fortunes in this country than before, more people are also losing their jobs quite suddenly than before. And more and more ordinary people are investing in stocks and shares. If the ups and downs in the economy affect the market, it affects them. So the implications of the Budget are assumed to be of interest to everybody.

More channels than before decided to focus on the run-up to the Budget. Doodarshan did a fairly solid job on the Economic Survey, on analysing the railway budget, and of a sectoral analysis of the Budget. This column is going to the press on Budget Day, within an hour or two of its being presented, without having had a chance to look at the totality of coverage. With stiff competition from cricket this year, Star News did the smartest job of covering the Finance Minister's speech. It split the screen to show the FM, carried the highlights of the budget as it was being presented, a sensex marker which kept track of the stock market, as well as news updates in yet another corner. Here you occasionally got your Mumbai test update.

Zee News promised a new look with this year's budget and came up with a monstrosity of virtual sets, and an on-hire anchor in the person of Shireen of "Good Morning India" fame. Shireen and Co. have broken off from Prannoy Roy's NDTV and set themselves up as a TV production house. She was presentable and was not required to be much else since the channel seemed to have decided in advance that nobody's intellect should be taxed. Since Zee's male anchors are notoriously un-glamorous, it was an improvement. The channel decided to dumb down with vengeance with its rather cloying "My Budget" approach, with on-the-side interviews with Rina Dhaka, Sonal Mansingh and sundry other glamorous consumers thrown in.

Aaj Tak featured one really memorable discussion in the days before the Budget, with the Balco controversy generating heat in Parliament. In contrast to Bharatiya Janata Party spokesman Jagdish Shettigar who was made mincemeat of a day or two before on the "Big Fight" on Star News, the Minister for disinvestment, Arun Shourie had his facts and figures at his fingertips. But as the hour wore on, this programme on disinvestment became a brilliant example of why a newspaper can inform much more effectively than television. Each time Shourie tried to enlighten he was interrupted. Kapil Sibal, representing the Congress, was not particularly boned up on the facts but that did not stop him from being as noisy as possible. And when he did not interrupt, India Today editor Prabhu Chawla who was supposed to be anchoring the programme did. He seemed congenitally incapable of letting Shourie have his say. By the end of the hour the minister wearily gave up and we were none the wiser on whether the criticism of the deal was justified. So much for being media rich.

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What is the point of having a TV news channel if you cannot bend it occasionally to your advantage? Star TV has in the past used its channels to lobby for broadcasting policy that suits its interests in this country. Last week it was the turn of Zee News which ran an hour-long programme in its slot called Prime Time entitled, "Who has the remote?" For the entire hour, they pursued a one-point agenda which had little to do with the stated subject of the programme, and everything to do with the Zee empire's desire to have the Direct-To-Home policy of the Government subserve its own interests. They wanted to know why the Government had imposed a 20 per cent limit for broadcasters in DTH ownership. And they kept citing the instance of the Time Warner-AOL merger, and running a strip during the telecast to show that the behemoth-in-the-making owns a variety of media including DTH and cable and print.

The problem, thoug, is that viewers are not idiots and can recognise a loaded programme when they see one. It does not help when the channel picks incompetent journalists for the job. They hammered away in such single-minded fashion that all they ended up with was a highly exasperated Sushma Swaraj, who reminded them more than once in the course of the programme of why she had been driven to take steps to prevent a vertical monopoly. Zee TV's cable arm Siti Cable had tried to keep out the rival Aaj Tak from cable menus, she said. For that matter, they had also tried to keep out some of the Star Channels in the recent past. Unable to deny the accusation outright, the pair anchoring this programme had a lame comeback.

This column got a personal taste of this agenda-driven programme when one of its anchors landed up to interview yours truly, kept asking the 20 per cent question in different ways, and when he did not get the answer he was angling for, chose not to use it, settling instead for an innocuous sound bite.

Why is the Government pre-empting regulation by bringing in DTH even before the Convergence Bill has been introduced in Parliament, was another question the programme kept asking. My dear ham-handed lads, I could tell you the answer to that one. The primary reason why the Government suddenly rushed in DTH last year was because cable companies like Siti masterminded the cable operators strike in Delhi in response to the Government's efforts to amend the existing cable act. Suddenly the Government realised that you needed a parallel delivery system to break the cable distributor's stranglehold on satellite TV delivery. And it can hardly defeat that objective by allowing the same Zee to own majority interests in DTH as well.

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Within New York's melting pot several Indian writers of fiction and poetry flourish, giving voice to a muse that draws heavily on the homeland. Living and working here, walking the city's streets, meeting occasionally at an Indian restaurant in Brooklyn, and in the case of some like Amitava Ghosh spending time in both continents every year, they contribute to the literary output of the United States, while being fondly claimed back home. Last week "Across Seven Seas", which really is quite a delightful programme on the Indian diaspora on DD News, talked to this talented and articulate fraternity, getting them to read out some of their work for their camera, and hold forth in general on why their work continues to draw heavily on India and Indians.

There was Ghosh in his home, with his children, Shashi Tharoor holding forth and reading aloud a poem, Suketu Mehta at his computer, and Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali. Jhumpa Lahiri was missing, she was presumably back home being wed. The programme also caught up with the latest non-resident Indian literary wonder, Manil Suri, though he is not New York based, at a reading of his book The Death of Vishnu. Farah Deba who scripts and anchors this series, never does a lazy job, and the camera work is suitably evocative.

The round of interviews with the Indian writers was topped off with visits to literary agents and publishers, including Barbara Epstien, the founder and editor of the New York Review of Books. They talked about both the genuine Indian talent that is being feted, and the me-too tribe of non-resident Indian writers trying to flog the exotica back home through manuscripts that are less than inspired.

There must be dozens of heart warming TV stories in the lives of Indians scattered around the world. This programme does an intelligent job of ferreting them out each week. But Doordarshan is killing it with unimaginative scheduling. It airs only on Saturday mornings on DD News at 8.30 am. It does repeat at 6.30 pm on Thursdays, but in Hindi, as "Saat Samundar Par". The English version should ideally have a late evening slot on some other DD channel which is better distributed across the country. Far more mediocre programmes on DD News and DD 1 get better visibility. This coming Thursday the series will feature Indians abroad who work in the mainstream international media, as well as those who have spawned ethnic media in the US.

On Sony Max tonight: Deepa Mehta's "1947-Earth". At 9 p.m.

Angry query from a reader: Why can't DD Sports have two feeds available to cable operators as other channels do - one Hindi and one English? And why can the channel not wait for an over to finish before putting on the ads?

SEVANTI NINAN

E-mail the writer at sevantininan@vsnl.com

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