Thursday, December 01, 2005

Now or Never!

So insult to the people who work there but this Times Now business is getting quite weird. At every presser they send reporters to interview the relevant corporate honcho and I figure that the Corp Commpeople are getting quite pissed that nothing comes out of it. At some recent pressers I believe some Corp Comm people (of all people) have put their foot down to Times Never (as a senior editor at ToI called it while I spoke to him the other day). Anyway, people have given up speculating when the channel shall be launched, some advertising blokes are now of the belief that they'll wait for hell to freeze over. The other new network - Rajdeep TV (aka CNN-IBN) is going on air on the second of January. Yipee-yay-yay, yet another channel to skip. The funny thing is that I believe that the co-axial cable that carries your cable signal into your house cannot deal with more than 70-odd channels without signal degradation. I'll be really pissed if any of these channels degrade the signal of Discovery Travel and Living which is currently the only channel I'll watch which doesn't show sports.
On another note, my autodriver today morning gave me the lowdown on the traffic problems that the Big B's ailment has been causing around Lilavati Hospital. Thousands of fans are pouring in to pray for the Amitabh. So how is the man? I was talking to a friend last night who is one of India's top film critics (no, not the plagarists who work in certain newspapers), he was telling me the story behind the monkey-cap. It appears that the man wears a wig because he has a bald patch almost as bad as Vir Sanghvi's. Ouch! But that is incidental information.
Now, what is known is that if a 64-year old man works 17-18 hours a day, his body will eventually give up and maybe old injuries will act up (as they have done, the old 1982 Coolie injury has acted up). I agree with most writers that the man should take a break and let other people do advertisements on TV (OK, people other than SRK that is).
Interestingly, this friend of mine gave me another bit of interesting news - which you'll never read in a newspaper. It appears that all those celebs going to meet the man - well none of them actually met him. They were greeted by Junior and his sis and shooed off. The only people allowed to meet him - Amar Singh, Subroto Roy, Anil Ambani and only one person with a Bollywood connection - Gauri Khan (Mrs SRK to others). Well, Yash Chopra would have been allowed to meet him, but he was sleeping around that time.
Interesting things you can get out of people when a couple of beers get passed around!
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9 comments:

Anonymous said...

wonderful ... no one will say u are just 4 months in the city :-)

Anonymous said...

And we don't even have to buy the beer to get all this.. Maybe I will buy you someday, we never get enough of those who is sleeping with whom types lol... I still remember the father son beauty pageant story teeheee

Anonymous said...

All the 70 don't count actually. If you can't be on the prime band (the 12-15 channels you used to able to tune in the DD only days) you are practically out of the game. I am sure the specifics for getting that space has been already worked out, since the programming does not count as much as the placement you get on the spectrum to make a channel work. My cable chappie's already consigned DT&LC to the hyper band, which is weird since channels like PTV, QTV and DWTV find a place before the channel. But considering that it is Delhi after all, I guess I am lucky to be able to receive it still. BTW, I might just grace the big mango with my unholy presence pretty soon, we gotta get some servers up and running there, will keep you posted.

Anonymous said...

y dontcha do some research on DTH for our benefit :-)

met S in delhi on tues, btw

Anonymous said...

This is on a slight different note...could'nt find your e-mail add..so posting it here.

Don't know if you have looked at today's Mid-Day....anyways here is the sad bit..

http://sakshijuneja.com/blog/?p=230

Anonymous said...

Why Gauri Khan?

Anonymous said...

So Now has turned into Never? Its getting crazier by the day. Last I heard they were calling it Times When!
There are a lot of people who've bet their lives on that channel, just hope it launches soon. Its not a great idea to have wasted close to a year of your professional life. Wasted because though these people are working, nobody knows they exist.

K said...

Codey : I will switch over to DTH once the environment becomes a bit more competitive, because if nothing else I'll get Cartoon Network in English and not get Discovery English somewhere in Channel 600 or something.
Bona : Pay me and I'll do it!
Sakshi : I wonder if Deshmukh sleeps through his sons movies.
T_M : I have no idea.
Shivangi : There is still too much confusion around that channel. Thats why Times Never.

Anonymous said...

And yes, forgot to add, Travel and Living! Dont even begin to ask how amazing that channel is...