Media

Playing For The Boy

When Rohit Brijnath is on song, he’s a heck of a writer. His latest piece on Sachin Tendulkar is wonderful, and I love the way it ends:

What does Tendulkar play for? Team, himself, pride, records? Maybe he plays because part of him is just a boy who finds himself when bat meets ball. Maybe he plays because of a boy agog in the stands. Maybe he has summoned this last reservoir of energy to show a kid, now old enough to understand, why, for 18 years, the world has made such a fuss about his father.

Read the full thing.

(Link via Prem Panicker.)

Always At Olive

Malaika Arora Khan and Kamal Sidhu seem to be hanging out a lot at Olive. Consider the two excerpts below:

Another Thursday night in Mumbai, another celebrity-packed crowd at the Olive Bar and Kitchen.

The model-turned-actress Amrita Arora was there, along with her sister, Malaika Arora Khan, the spicy sex symbol of Bollywood. Nearby, the prodigal founder of Hotmail, Sabeer Bhatia, was holding court with several pretty young things in hip-hugging jeans and stiletto heels. Then all heads turned when the television personality Kamal Sidhu sauntered past the proverbial velvet rope, blowing kisses in all directions. [Denny Lee of the NY Times, February 2005.]

And

At Olive Bar & Kitchen, the rubbernecking was so intense that people were in danger of choking on their bruschettas. Was that Malaika Arora Khan, the model and actress? Was she talking to Kamal Sidhu, the television personality? [Stanley Stewart of the London Times, November 2007.]

Note that Stewart doesn’t say he saw Malaika and Kamal, but speculates on it, thus ensuring plausible deniability. Neat.

The two stories are otherwise dissimilar, except for one bit: In the first, Suketu Mehta is quoted as saying, “Every night is a party in Bombay.” In the second, Naresh Fernandes is quoted as saying, “In Bombay, every night is party night.”

Naresh, the editor of Time Out Mumbai, is a friend, so I wrote to him to find out what this was about. While he didn’t remember the details of the conversation, or if it took place, he did quip, “I’m surprised that Suketu and I are so in synch that we say exactly the same things now.” He also mentioned that Time Out Mumbai did not begin “in the hope of chronicling [Mumbai’s nightlife]”, as Stewart claims.

Anyway, if you ever desire to bump into Malaika and Kamal, you know where to go. But please don’t write about it!

Shashi Tharoor: The Conviction of Banality

It takes a special skill to nail the essence of a writer in one pithy sentence, and Chandrahas Choudhury does just that when he describes Shashi Tharoor’s The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone as “a ragbag of columns and op-eds in which ancient platitudes, second-hand insights, and tacky witticisms are aimed at the reader with a quite breathtaking conviction.”

Anyone who has read Tharoor’s Sunday column in the Times of India will surely sigh and agree. My beef with Tharoor, though, is not with his monumental banality or his lack of insight, but with his double-standards on matters like free speech. For example, in a piece earlier this year, he correctly supported MF Husain, but refused to stand up for the Danish cartoonists. He wrote:

[I]‘d like to deal with those who’ve questioned my own record: many have written to ask whether I have spoken out in favour of freedom of expression elsewhere (I have, for decades, and continue to do so); whether I have publicly defended Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses (I have, widely, and in writing as well as in person); and whether I have spoken in favour of the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed (I have not, because I consider them a needless provocation). The last line of questioning, I must say, irritated me; those who draw a parallel between Husain’s art and a bunch of cartoons have not begun to understand the first thing about either.

This excerpt makes clear, of course, that Tharoor does not understand the first thing about free speech—if it was only allowed to those whose expression has the approval of tasteful commissars like Tharoor, what meaning would freedom have at all?

One of the things Chandrahas points out in his review, by the way, is how “one of Tharoor’s main subjects” is “the ‘I’” And indeed, in the first sentence of the excerpt I quoted above, there are eight ‘I’s and one ‘my’. Prolific.

Also read: Why Indian ‘liberals’ aren’t quite liberal.

Show me the tree!

First there was the whole saga about Aishwarya Rai marrying a tree. Then, recently, a denial from Aishwarya. Well, now Amitabh Bachchan himself has spoken:

Ash is not married to a tree! […] It’s a challenge—please show me the tree she married! Bring that person who married her to the tree. Where did it happen?

Hmm. Perhaps they’ve killed off the tree and buried it. Or maybe they’ve kidnapped its saplings and warned the tree to deny everything or else…

Perhaps we should just take Mr Bachchan at his word. But why, I wonder, would so many people report the matter if there wasn’t something to it? Still, that’s our media…

(Link via email from Arjun Swarup.)

Vibrating condoms and Indian culture

Everywhere there is joy and squealing. CNN-IBN reports:

The Madhya Pradesh government has banned the sale of Crezendo condom in the state saying it’s against Indian culture.

Public Works Minister in BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh Kailash Vijayvargiya has taken up cudgels against Hindustan Latex Ltd’s condom on behalf of the government.

Vijayvargiya says the condom is a sex toy and will not be allowed to be sold in the state.

I’d argue that the penis is a sex toy and should be banned from Madhya Pradesh as well. And I’m also most curious to know what a public works minister is doing commenting on this matter. What public works?

CNN-IBN’s TV news report on this is also hilarious—I love the back-and-forth between the anchor and the reporter, and I’d take their tone as mock seriousness if they weren’t always like this. The vox pops are immense fun too. These reporters are going to put satirists out of work. Watch:

(Links via separate emails from Anand Krishnamoorthi, Gautam John and Ashutosh Jogalekar.)

All men are pigs…

… if they don’t carry condoms. Nice commercial:

So do you find anything objectionable about this commercial? Fox and CBS did, and refused to carry it on their networks. In a statement, Fox said:

Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy.

Heh. Fox’s slogan really should be “Back to the 19th Century.” I’m sure what they regret most about the 20th century, even more than the Holocaust, is the emancipation of women—birth control had a lot to do with setting women free, and is a natural enemy. I hardly need to spell out who the pigs really are in this story.

There’s a pithy quote in that story by Carol Carrozza, a marketing executive, that just about sums it up:

We always find it funny that you can use sex to sell jewelry and cars, but you can’t use sex to sell condoms.

Princess Diana’s privacy

Public letters are most illuminating, and two recently released in Britain concern the use of images of Princess Diana’s accident in a Channel 4 documentary. Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, the private secretary of Princes William and Harry, wrote a letter to Channel 4 asking them to “appreciate fully that publishing such material causes great hurt to us, our father, our mother’s family and all those who so loved and respected her.”

Kevin Lygo, Channel 4’s director of television and content, replied saying that “in the context of a measured and responsible history programme, these photographs provide, for the first time, an accurate and detailed eyewitness record of an event of international importance that for ten years has been obscured by conspiracy theories, claims and counter-claims.”

My position: While the media may have the right to publish photographs of events that take place in the public space, publishing pictures of someone’s mutilated body would be tasteless and insensitive. However, Lygo clarified in his letter that Princess Diana wasn’t visible in any of the pictures that Channel 4 was showing, and I think it is silly, then, to object muchly. This is especially in the light of the conspiracy theories surrounding the accident—most famously by Mohamed al-Fayed—and if the documentary serves to inquire into the truth, then it is worthy journalism.

Meanwhile, here’s an excellent recreation by the Guardian of the hours leading up to the accident, and here’s an interview of Trevor Rees-Jones, the only survivor of the crash.

“A trial balloon”

On the subject of Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi, the information and broadcasting minister, playing the moral police, an unnamed news channel head is quoted as saying:

I don’t see why we are surprised a Congress government is playing moral police. All parties want to control a powerful medium like television. No political party can afford to ban a news channel. But going after soft targets like AXN and FTV is like floating a trial balloon. It sends a shiver down the spines of all broadcasters.

Well, hardly anyone protested. So will there be more balloons?