Opinion Big Day,Small Screen

When the real results finally came out,there was — for such a momentous occasion — a palpable sense of disappointment that there weren’t enough surprises; news TV lives on surprises,self-defeating for a medium that also wants to live on spoilers. So,instead of raising its game to the occasion,TV brought the occasion down to its level.

On Times Now,for example,the big news for a while was that Alagiri didn’t want to talk to Times Now,he was that depressed. On Times Now,the news is always about Times Now. Over at Headlines Today,Rahul Kanwal walked around a giant set,with dwarfed panellists sitting at little isolated tables like quiz teams; he himself looked like he was dressed as a schoolboy quizmaster,in an odd role reversal. And nobody wanted to talk about Assam,for some reason; when Javed Ansari started to,Kanwal said abruptly,“OK,we’ve done Assam,” like it was a disagreeable chore best completed in seconds. Still,he mostly let people finish,and so you felt you got something from the discussion.

That wasn’t the case over on NDTV. At one point Nilotpal Basu of the CPM was just beginning to explain where the Left had gone wrong on education policy,a major part of its failure,when he was interrupted by Prannoy Roy. Barkha Dutt,standing in a green kurta with green children outside Mamata’s house,wanted to talk about the sounds of celebration. As if we couldn’t hear the conches in the background. Dutt had just been in Pakistan. There are lots of big stories; does the same person have to be everywhere? Rush about too much and one could wind up asking “what the one thing was” the CPM did wrong. Arre,they’ve ruled for three decades,why would they only get one thing wrong? Basu said as much; Dorab Patel followed up — but Prannoy Roy interrupted him to go back to Dutt,who wanted to berate Basu for not answering the question satisfactorily,although she had been talking to insistently noisy children while he had answered it.

“One central failure,” she demanded again,and when Basu spluttered helplessly through his Comrade Stalin moustache,Roy shook his head,headmaster-like,and said his attitude was “very disappointing”. He added: “Look at the Howrah Bridge,” the set backdrop,“when you walk there in the morning,what will be going through your mind?” (Probably why on earth he chose the most crowded road in Kolkata for a morning walk.)

The backdrop was meaningful,too,on Headlines Today,which went to MJ Akbar in Kolkata’s beautiful old Town Hall for a panel of Thoughtful Bengalis. Bad idea. Akbar couldn’t decide if he was interviewer or interviewee; and at one point he asked a woman panellist — I don’t know who,since no name was provided,unlike for the men — “are the women [in politics behaving like men?” Sigh. (Mamata to CNN-IBN: “I am a simple man.”) The other woman,the designer Nilanjana Chakraborty (introduced erroneously as an actor) said,grandly in response that “Bengal leads from the front” about women in politics. No,it doesn’t. Ma and Mamata do not a matriarchy make,ma’am.

Even at moments like this,TV now cannot restrain itself from looking for a gotcha quote. On CNN-IBN,Rajdeep Sardesai looked despondent that no Congressman would call this “Mamata’s victory” however hard he badgered them. Election coverage has changed,yes. On the biggest of days,news TV winds up thinking small.

mihir.sharma@expressindia.com