MxMIndia

Tag: Grouse

  • Every Thursday, Ranjona Banerji will write about a grouse. Either spewing venom or tongue-in-cheek

    [MJR] Making sense of RBI cuts

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    This minor rant is against no one but myself, and my inability to understand the purpose of these one million business news channels on Indian television. There, see, my error in comprehension in the first sentence itself. These channels have nothing to do with news – they have to do with the stock market and sometimes the commodities and properties markets. No connection with business news at all.

     

    Anyway, in an attempt to get the latest on the RBI’s rate cuts, I travelled through all the stock market channels to find out (This is a mistake I have made before, I must confess. Hope springs eternal… said Alexander Pope. He was neither a stock nor a commodities broker or even a real estate agent, so never mind who he was). Did I find out anything? Of course not. I don’t think the Reserve Bank of India really exists in these exclusive clubs.

     

    Oddly, the minute I randomly arrived at a regular news channel, there was D Subbarao, RBI governor, telling us what was in store for us: loans, EMIs, fixed deposits, inflation, GDP, government fiscal policy and more.

     

    O ye of little faith, you might think, slamming TV news everyday and then finding them more that adequate when required. But I have one point in my defence for this little mistake about trying the business route: the stock market channels were really quite good during the unveiling of the Union budget.

     

    Which means I know where I have to go next year but never again until then, unless of course I want to listen to a language I can’t understand and watch lots of little arrows in different colours going up and down. Although I could always watch entertainment news segments if I want to be really confused…

     

  • Every Thursday, Ranjona Banerji will write about a grouse. Either spewing venom or tongue-in-cheek

    [MJR] A tsunami of hot air and hysteria on Indian TV

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Yes, it is true that there were fears of a tsunami in countries along the Indian Ocean on Wednesday. It is also true that there was terrible damage in the tsunami of December 26, 2004. But there was no need for Indian TV anchors and reporters to start behaving like ambulance chasers as they geared up with excitement to cover this momentous event.

     

    This high-pitched hysteria for every single event, newsworthy or otherwise, gets exceedingly tedious, especially when there is little modulation in tone or pitch. Most Indian TV news channels didn’t even have adequate information nor do they have credible weather anchors, geologists or meteorologists on call. All they can do therefore is to keep repeating the same thing over and over again.

     

    On Wednesday, although a tsunami warning was issued, no tsunami had happened yet. There was no call therefore to behave like the end of the world was upon us. This only engenders panic, made worse by the fact that reporters and anchors say one thing and the texts that run across TV screens imply quite something else.

     

    International channels were a study in contrast. Al Jazeera and the BBC stuck to other world news – Korea, Syria, economic crisis – while CNN concentrated on the earthquake in Indonesia and possible after-effects. There was no breathless reporting; rather the effort was to explain what was happening in a sober and matter-of-fact manner. No attempts were made to audition for a travelling ‘jatra’ party, which appears to be the Indian model. And CNN’s weather expert Mari Ramos was as always excellent in her information and analysis.

     

  • Every Thursday, Ranjona Banerji will write about a grouse. Either spewing venom or tongue-in-cheek

    [MJR] Breakfast with Bollywood and other abominations

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Suppose (warning, blasphemy follows) you’re the kind of person who doesn’t manage to read a newspaper in the morning before you leave for work so you keep the TV on to get the latest through “breakfast news”.

     

    This is what I found out today: Katy Perry sang and danced and was looking for curry and something in India, said NDTV.  IPL season 5 starts with a match between Mumbai Indians and Chennai Super Kings. Ravi Shastri said Chennai was going to win and Moody said Mumbai was going to win, both on Times Now. Headlines Today said that Akshay Kumar is acting in a new film directed by Prabhu Deva called Rowdy something.

     

    Given the high drama on TV the night before over the $10 million bounty on Hafiz Saeed’s head placed by the US, I foolishly thought (it’s amazing how foolish I feel when I watch TV) that there would be some more on that. Not on Times Now at any rate.

     

    NDTV had a thought-provoking report on trafficking of young girls and women from West Bengal, being led into brothels in Pune, Mumbai and Delhi. Anderson Cooper 360 was largely focused on the Republican primaries. The BBC was on Newsday, so that’s bits from here and there, with plenty on China and something on the new James Bond film (I didn’t stop long enough to watch that, had had enough of films thanks to Headlines Today).

     

    That left CNN-IBN who told me everything I wanted to know about Hafiz Saeed and Pakistan’s reaction to the US bounty.

     

    My grouse therefore is that I was wrong yesterday for castigating newspaper websites for being too full of cricket and Bollywood and giving TV a clean chit. Or is my grouse that websites are deceptive? Something like that.