Sunday 8 January 2012

I thought you were doing the programme for me; Mr. TV News Anchor!

Sir, I may be a Deseemoron, but must you take me to be such a nonentity that you forget it altogether that in fact you are doing the programme for me? I mean not me literally but multitude of ordinary viewers all over India and even abroad.

My grouse is about your unfailing tendency to butt in and disturb the chain of thought of a participant who may be putting his point across at a particular time on a particular topic on your discussion programme. Now, you may truly be very intelligent to figure out mid-way his sentence as to what he may be wanting to say. But don't you think that I, in fact many of us, for whom the programme is actually intended may want to hear his point fully to understand the real import of his argument? I wish you could see me just as I (and I'm sure I am not alone) watch you doing the programme and you'd have witnessed as to how frustrated I become. Sometimes I even plead aloud with folded hands, "don't...please don't...", when you begin to interject or disturb the chain of thought of a (any) particular participant of yours whom I may be listening to with rapt attention. But you are so smug that you'll never care to know, how your viewers feel.

the question is, why you do it? I think the reasons are somewhat mixed:

Firstly, I feel you really love your own voice very much and if it does not resonate - even if only a word or two of interposition - every three or four seconds in your ear, you begin to feel insecure or irrelevant.

Secondly, I think you have little respect for your audience; you think most of them are morons (of-course this deseemoron for sure) anyway and primarily they have to be dished out a 'particular point of view' and sure enough it has to be the most intelligent point of view. Yours.

Thirdly, you've been greatly inspired from Bollywood and are hugely taken in by its sense of grandeur and melodrama. Thus you feel bounden to present your programme with the splendour of a court room trial. The tenor and tone of your own words could match the speech of any Shakesperean character. Truth may matter less, performance must matter more. You get afflicted by the all encompassing magnificence of your own persona in your own mind.

Fourthly and very importantly, you love to play God. You often pronounce what particular turn a situation 'might' take mostly based on the speculation of your participants and in the event that even a tiny part of it might accidentally come true, you boastfully and repeatedly begin to claim proprietorship on that, claiming; "as first reported on....T...NOW or T...THEN or H TODAY or NN & BN..." But if it doesn't come true...? Well...well...well.

Fifthly, sure enough you do indulge in a subtle act of 'playing favourites', though at times you fail to disguise your indulgence. This in my view is akin to putting your hand in the till, because fundamentally your loyalty has to be to me the viewer and not to your own ideologies or beliefs. Trust me, much as you might think otherwise, most of them are not unintelligent.

Sixthly and most dangerously, please, please, please; keep away from pre-inquisitioning, because that's what many times you deliberately or inadvertently appear to do. Please respect and give value to the maxim, "one is innocent till proven guilty"; and the job of doing so is not yours but of that of a court. In a discussion programme on TV, one expects a dispassionate analysis of  issues and beliefs; not interrogation, prosecution and judgmental pontification. So, please watch it.

Fianally SIR, I urge upon you to be what you are truly supposed to be; an impartial, unimposing and unobtrusive facilitator. A true-blue anchor; nothing less, nothing more. And sir, if because of your impressive pair of glasses and of course equally impressive baritone voice, you think that this piece was intended only for you; please rest assured it's not so. It is for all of you whom we have entrusted with the sanctity of a discussion programme on national TV.

Unassumingly yours,

Deseemoron























 


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