Imagine this scenario. It is not hard to do. A typical middle class Indian home in Delhi. Father walks into son’s room, sees apple of his eye glued to his studies and shouts, “You foolish boy, stop wasting your time, why aren’t you singing and dancing, the Sa Re Ga Ma Pa selection is on in one week.”

Across the country, in a small hamlet in Andhra, mother sews together some garish costume so little Usha can whirl about to the strains of Aaja Nachle and somewhere two hours away by air in Punjab, Pappu the poppet is feted by the neighbours because Javed Jaffery praised his ability to moonwalk and exulted over his convincing rendition of ‘Kabhi Kabhi.’

Love songs and largesse at seven years and four months.

With 60 hours of such mind numbing drivel on TV every day and the total dedication of millions of mothers and fathers fondly hoping for a bonanza, the Indian middle class and its traditionally ignored lower end are finally getting their seven minutes of fame. The point is what price are we paying for that limelight and when will it turn sour on a generation exponentially dedicating itself to gyrating in sync with the lyrics of l’amour before they have turned the hairpin bend of puberty?

It is not a global phenomenon. Let’s not kid ourselves. It is not even a welcome splash of colour in a grey life, which is the sort of air-conditioned tripe the rich and comfortable fling like mud clods at the not-so-affluent.

Such entertainment is fine as a diversion, a sort of also ran in the race to adulthood, but when it becomes a fetish, an obsession that is pathetic in its gluttony, its lack of any redeeming quality and is bedrocked in precocious tastelessness, then we need to worry. Pandemic mediocrity that will turn poisonous even as we cheerfully behave as if it is harmless fun.

I think of Marallus in Julius Caeser expressing despair; Run to your house and fall upon your knees, pray to the gods to intermit this plague that befalls thee. Greed is never harmless. The chase after fool’s gold always comes with a price. Greed at runaway speed is ugly. When adults use prime time insults to belittle children they are not hardening the kids for life’s stony path, they are mocking them for cheap laughs and ratings in a nation where humour has been doled in measly fashion and linked to ailment: stuttering, being fat or crippled.

The survey figures indicate that as many as 30 million children are watching a show of their peers engaged in song and dance routines at some time or the other in a given day while thousands bid for live presence and dry mouthed, anxious parents sit in suspense for cruelly over-rated assessments of nascent talent.

A study of the sociological implications of the crude and often tasteless remarks made by the judges, the precocious conversations masquerading as humour, the deep analysis of a love song would fall just short of statutory rape of minors because the invasion is so complete as to make the physical violation integral.

And in case I come out like some pulpit pounding neurotic, ask yourselves how this tsunami in gross bad taste is brainwashing our children and their parents who actually sit there like airheads and watch their children being lacerated by the so-called judges. Not for winning a debate or a spelling bee, not for coming out tops in a quiz or even displaying the skill for the arts and sciences, sport and the classics, but only for the imitation of commercial pap.

When I began this article I just wanted to moan and groan about falling standards until an advertising friend of mine (okay, we all have some weaknesses) sent me some figures. Three hundred million manhours down the drain watching this stuff. Every day. Almost 15 per cent of the budget by consumer companies dedicated to this genre, thereby making them accomplices in the charade that this is fun and games. It is not.

The corruption of pre-teens is nearly total if you look at the statistics. Except for live Twenty20 cricket and the one-dayers, these song and dance travesties account for maximum family viewing. What makes one sick to the stomach is that neither the channels nor the producers nor the participants and judges think they are contributing to the greater bad.

The poverty of intellect is astounding. Beating up on little children is a sport and the torturous patronizing of the defeated makes one search for a bucket. The biggest problem is to get enough people to listen to the beat of the pied piper and realize that his malevolent tune is stealing our children away from their childhood. You start tom tomming the mediocrity inherent in such shows and everyone has this ‘oh, come on, it is just kids’ look on their faces.

So come on, son, leave the books alone and put on your costume and your ghungroos.

If you were once aspiring to be Secretary General of the UN and lived on the inside track of the caviar and champagne circuit and almost touched the stars then remarks like these are not only part of your psyche but are echoed by all of us in our drawing rooms.

So, what is the big deal?

It is in the timing, mate. You made the remark about the same time as India’s leadership was poncing about setting austerity to music. Mrs Gandhi (Soniaji) was flying Y class and making a production of it, her son was sitting in a chair car while the top brass of the Railways was sweating bullets about what did he have to go do that for, now we will be all posted to Assam or something and having been plucked out gracelessly from his 5-star residence Mr Tharoor himself had been chastised to stay in the Kerala House, the atmosphere was not right.

So talk about great moments in bad timing.

The Congress is not upset about the cattle class observation. They are upset about his calling them holy cows and they believe he mocked them for these tawdry exercises designed for idiot media that cannot still see drivel for what it is…pure drivel.

If there is anything that goes up my nose it is watching an erudite, intelligent, extremely arrogant man like Tharoor having to kneel in the dust and eat crow followed by a dessert of humble pie. Hey man, stand up and walk tall, stop with the sniveling and the groveling, no job, even that of a junior minister, is worth sucking up these twits. You stand by what you said. All of India agrees that travelling on these flights in economy is pure cattle class.

Rahul and I have had a subliminal sharing experience. After I read about his trip by train I was so moved by guilt at travelling only by air that I promptly took a Business Class Air India flight to India (which is about a level less than a cattle car seat on a low budget airline) and then dropped my pretentious lifestyle by booking a train ticket to Dehra Dun.

I called Rail Bhavan but the Minister was busy (his PA to the PS to the OSD told me that) and so no delegation of high officials was able to coincidentally fetch up at the station to flag me off. Unfortunately, my message did not get through and there was some glitch (Jayanti Natrajan must have stopped it) but the sweeper brigade from the Municipality did not make it to give the platform a springcleaning and so I entered the Shatabdi after trekking several hundred yards of dirty concrete.

Expecting to see the security dispatch from the Home Ministry (which I had requisitioned) I was a trifle disappointed. Worse, no policemen pushed common unwashed folks aside for me to blaze a trail to my seat. I wonder if Rahul had to gallop past the throng from bogey to bogey to find his name on the flapping half -torn chart.

Twenty minutes of Treasure hunt went by before I discovered my seat and instead of six Black Cats my travelling companions were a lady with a baby, another lady with a child of six who was practising his debut on sa re ga ma, a man who belched, two paan-chewing lalaji types and a man on a mobile phone telling his staff how to run the office while he was away except he wasn’t away.

Reflecting casually whether Rahul and I had the same experience I realized we did. I also had my water from a paper cup.

by Bikram Vohra

Editorial integrity, as we once knew it, died long back and no one really noticed. Like those doves they shoot and mark with crimson to denote peace or swords rusting in their own glory. Much the same way, senior journalists sold their souls to the highest bidder and turned Faustian. It all began when editors per se betrayed the cause. Like Mark Anthony leaving the battle of Actium to chase Cleopatra, these fourth estate mandarins dumped their staffs and galloped off after filthy lucre. Admirable was the fact that they could gallop with bended knees.

Before you knew it, editors had become representatives of the management instead of being the fierce front-liners for their sad little flock of scribes. They cheerfully sacrificed their charges to survive in their jobs and so the moat was breached. We had lost the good fight and we still are largely held at ransom by our own.

The chasm between the editor’s salary and the next five put together was indicative of the growing caste system in journalism. Naturally, any sporadic attempt to bridge with a scoop or a strong report met with disaster. No, we cannot run this became the mantra in the newsroom. As newspaper owners realized that these journalists of the 21^st century were men and women largely made of straw and easy to buy and sell, they predicated editorial policy to their business interests and the editor today is just another guard dog for the same interests. News is censored in-house and you can cry yourself hoarse but it is true. Elitist editors have made it so. The 100 member party-going, cigar-smoking, pontificating little rabbits who run the media mafia can be body stripped and searched and you will be hard placed to find a soupcon of moral courage in them.

 With no one to back it, Editorial  is often seen as an increasingly necessary evil that has to be tolerated by other departments and if the proprietors could do away with it entirely they probably would.

As a matter of fact this idea has been advocated by a very high profile owner of an Indian publishing house on the premise that a newspaper can be brought out untouched by dirty journalistic hands. Since professional Public Relations staff write better and do more home work than their journalistic counterparts and get a lot more money for doing so, all you need are technicians, not newshounds. Regrettably, as a tribe we are offering to Caesar so much space without Caesar even asking for it that very soon we will ourselves be only technicians totally besotted by the call to survive the day rather than seize it.

Excuse me, can you give me one more freebie goody-bag for my brother.

How has all this happened? What weakness within allowed us to be marginalized and is this, like global warming, just a phase? No hall of fame, clay feet in our bosses and deep and abiding insecurity have made us a pretty pathetic bunch.

Yet, there is hope. After 40 years on the business I would like to find some warm sanctuary in that thought. After all, TV killed the radio and the radio has come back with a vengeance. They said newspapers would be dead when we went into news overdrive and the Net linked up with the telly and the mobile phone to inundate us with a nonstop tsunami of information. Our synapses crackled and popped and we are now deep into news fatigue.

The newspaper, the magazine, the niche publication have been bruised and battered but they did not lie down like battle-weary troops and die. They are still there. So there must be some magic, some residual wunderbar about the published word that is forged in a special crucible. The touch, the texture, the intimacy of the paper and the printing, the artwork and the design, the inside story, the ability to return to it at will and as often as you like, all combine to create an awesome staying power.

Unfortunately, half a generation of good writers has run to the glamour of TV. Many more have found it financially pleasing to join the glossies and a fair amount of potential has dribbled into PR and the devil take your hind leg, it pays the bills, mate.

This is the period of transition. Not enough writers, columnists, commentators in the ranks. Too many youngsters seeking fame and bylines before they have taken off their diapers. Weak hierarchies, weaker editors who don’t or cannot write, too much emphasis on ‘how the paper looks’ than ‘how it reads.’ Advertising spurs the product, leaving the journalists vulnerable and often defenceless. Marketing is more important any way you cut it.

It will change. It always does. And the same technology that sidelined the print media will bring it back into the game. In fact, the worst is over. The new generation is heap smart. Slick, armed with savvy and the smarts, with easy access to information, enjoying the arrogance of youth and not afraid to say it like it is. And they have begun to read books again and turn away from their woofers and tweeters and 5-speaker surround systems. This is a global phenomenon where the dynamics of the world are no longer insular. You cannot shut the window on the new winds. Truly, the newspaper and the magazine will return to their old glory if those who work in it respect themselves and don’t sell themselves to the company store. It is the surrender to mediocrity that is our worst enemy. That and the need to find good leaders to plough the field, not those who kneel at the financial altar and bargain us away for cheap.