The Editorialist As Policymaker

SANTOSH DESAI

The aliens have landed, taken up tantric sex and sawed nubile young women in half. Regrettably, that is not an actual headline from a news channel . What was once a trickle of sensation-mongering absurdity on India TV is now a full-scale deluge on virtually every Hindi channel. August 8 was a magnet for dire predictions made by bearded men in flowing robes. Disasters of many kinds were predicted; but the world somehow survived. Given the state of television news today, it is safe to believe that if something is on the news, it must be untrue.

If anyone uses Singh is King in a headline again, legal options must be examined. Following the trust vote and the by-now usual controversy around the new film of the same title, there was no respite from this phrase. There was, on the other hand, some respite from the cashfor- votes scandal which, in spite of a dummy sting carried out by the indefatigable Uma Bharti, seems to be slowly receding from public memory. The other big story of the week was the ongoing protests in Jammu over the Amarnath land allotment, something that doesn’t look like its going to end well. The Hindustan Times has begun to take itself quite seriously as a crafter of policy. It ran a front page headlined story on its suggestions for solving the Amarnath problem and followed it up with a front page self-congratulatory pat on the back that ‘Delhi is cobbling together a solution on the lines of Hindustan Times suggestions’.

The court battle of the Mehtas to get a late abortion sparked a lively discussion on the merits of the current laws. Opinion was divided; Mail Today argued editorially for the court decision while the Times of India believed that abortion laws needed change. Manjula Padmanabhan made the uncomfortable point about whether this is any different from murder.

I caught a full episode of Uncommon Ground on NDTV this time. It featured an impassioned Medha Patkar and a very credible Anand Mahindra trying to have a real conversation. Mahindra was keen to find areas of agreement while Patkar was conscious of not being co-opted into any superficial concord. In spite of the vast gulf that separated the two, some progress was made. Rohini Nilekani anchored the show with unobtrusive deftness, nudging the two towards dialogue.

A new season of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations has begun and it is a pale shadow of its former self. Overproduced and overwritten, this season’s episodes take away everything that made the show watchable and pointedly do something else. I am hoping insanity prevails and Tony Bourdain is back to his un-tuxedoed wasted self.

Desai is the MD and CEO of Futurebrands