The wedding crashers

Excluded from Mahendra Singh Dhonis big day,TV was left to guess and improvise

Excluded from Mahendra Singh Dhonis big day,TV was left to guess and improvise
Headlines Today summed it up best: no access to the media but complete and extensive coverage throughout the day.
With field restrictions ensuring that the media was kept far away enough to deny them access to the Dhoni-Sakshi match in progress,the complete and extensive coverage took the aesthetically pleasing form of gazing at the facade of the hotel where the engagement was held.

Complete and extensive coverage also meant that all of last Sunday was spent with TV news crews creeping closer and closer to the said hotel,trying to figure out what was going on inside. And since they didnt get close enough to figure out much,they made it up as they went along.
So while the news channels began the day squabbling over when the wedding would be held Times Now veered between after the Australia series to within a few days,the Hindi news channels led by Star News and India TV favoured Sunday itself by midday it was clear: Sunday was the chosen day. Once that was confirmed,the show became very much like a limited overs game with TV news chasing down the target Dhoni had set them: could they get past the security at the resort and discover just what,exactly,was going on inside?

They could not. As we have seen on the cricket field,Dhoni knows a thing or two about keeping the opposition at bay. So,after a fairly fruitless few hours when they could not breach the Wall - and we dont mean Dravid news channels faced the daunting challenge of bringing us complete and extensive coverage of virtually nothing. Which is not very different from coverage of other more tangible events,so it was an instructive exercise.

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It took the shape of computerised images of Dhoni and Sakshi as bridegroom and bride with a campy little fire burning beside them for the pheras. (Star News). It meant singing wedding songs (News 24). It involved pundits and other glass-ball gazers predicting the impact of Sakshi on Dhoni and on Team India: the timing was auspicious,offered one lady clairvoyant on IBN-7,differences did exist between the couple but the match will be a good one,nevertheless. It required talking to anyone who might have been remotely closer to the wedding site than the media. Thus,we heard from the flower supplier on what he supplied roses,rose petals,garlands,of course (Headlines Today). It saw breaking news on Aaj Tak and news alerts on Times Now that the wedding would be at 8 pm something we had already learned from the pundit who was to conduct the wedding ceremony or so the channel claimed. We caught glimpses but only just of a horse arriving at the resort. We were assured it was the stallion for Dhoni (Aaj Tak). TV news was nothing if not intrepid. They did everything they could to penetrate Dhonis defences but while a maiden may have bowled him as Star News at some stage put it the media could not break through.

Still,Times Now did manage to procure footage from Sadhana TV of guests at the engagement on Saturday evening; all the news channels found John Abraham at the Dehradun airport and some discovered Suresh Raina inside an aeroplane on its way to Dehradun. We had fleeting images of Sakshi in dark glasses as she drove by in a car. At least one news alert told us that Sachin Tendulkar would not attend the wedding and Yuvraj Singhs tweets made the rounds. One Hindi news channel enacted scenes from a wedding at the same time they occurred inside the resort complex! The only surprise was that some reporters had not managed to pass themselves off as the flower supplier,the pandits assistant or,indeed,the horseman,and gain actual access.