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Indian TV talk shows twist news into a pretzel

Recently, a talk show on a religious figure turned into a slapping match between two participants and deteriorated alarmingly.

Perhaps the most dangerous development in India is the advent of aggressive television. With over 5,000 channels vying for the Television Rating Points, the hurtle to audio-visual disaster is ongoing - a cruel and mindless work in progress. In this scenario, the Talk Show has become a travesty of common sense. The multiple cloned programmes in different languages now 'attack' issues both violently and graphically and do this on a planned and deliberately provocative platform. Even possibly inflammatory issues are reduced to entertainment on the one hand and important stand offs are made trivial in the babble of sound that passes for audio. Half a dozen high profile opinionated individuals are shoved into pigeon holes and given an hour in which to speak shrilly over each other with the moderator doing anything else but being moderate. The whole idea is to inflame passion, create dissension and fling poison arrows with gay abandon. Destroying reputations through innuendo is a nightly exercise. Fitting facts into pre-conceived notions is the norm.
Recently, a talk show on a religious figure turned into a slapping match between two participants and deteriorated alarmingly. A foolish ban on meat for a particular community has sparked a furore that, as a priority, is purely laughable. Whether it is religion, caste, community, women's rights, crime, violence, cow slaughter, lynchings and mob rage, it does not matter what the subject is, the track followed is identical. There is an intrinsic danger in the importance of the subject and its treatment. The idea is to provoke and prod and sting and hurt, and this is where it becomes toxic.
These shows are seen as relaxation for a high-strung nation that commutes and works ten to twelve hours a day to come back to more hassles on the home front. An hour of white noise drowns out their despair of the day and it is comforting to watch these verbal duels on the screen.
But as a social tool, the TV in the huge nation of 1.2 billion has become a sharp knife for divisiveness and canned hatred. By bludgeoning millions into audio-visual submission every night (and day) it offers limelight, sour as that is, to kooks, religious bigots, gurus and other self-styled saviours in saffron, to fringe loonies and nut jobs of every kind. Whatever their absurd line of thought the recklessness of the producers in advocating an 'everything goes' policy, the more mayhem the better, does get listeners and converts hooked to the nonsense spewed off the screen.
Rage, hostility, pettiness, provincial shortsightedness, prejudice and bias set to a scream is the diet of the majority and it is now reaching dangerous proportions. This is the news that people are getting. Not from informed sources but from talk shows and chats where the news is twisted into a pretzel.
And because this is their only source of information, millions of people absorb the travesty as the truth and harden it into opinion.
There will be a payback as the schisms sharpen and harden and extreme rightwing lunatics get their fifteen minutes of fame.
There seems to be no stopping this hurtle into audio-visual hubris and there will be consequences of the worst sort if sanity is not restored into programing.
 There is a whole generation being taught that there is no harm in hatred.
bikram@khaleejtimes.com