Flippity-Floppity

What the Media Editor said a few days ago - KBC slipping, King Khan needs a lifeline. (Page 1 anchor Feb 3)
What the in-house TV-reviewer says today - Channel's star shines with SRK (Page 8 Nation Page, Delhi Metro edition - the online link isn't functioning as yet, but I'll have it up the moment I can)
Sometimes the best stuff about newspapers doesn't need to be thought up in someone's mind, the politics comes out right in the open. Joys! But this happened in Delhi, I don't know if Poonam's story was carried in Bombay. Could have been since Gurbir is on a witch-hunt against some bloggers (and UndieTV is happily attacking bloggers too) - more about that on a later date, because that will require a fairly complex understanding on the new medium that is the internet and I want to write a long post on that.
Two new papers in seven days, quite a bit for most people to handle. But MetroNOW is virtual facsimilie of Today, only a hell of a lot better. But the problem there is that, it was a given. I mean, Times Now almost instantly became better than Headlines Today, it is pretty bleeping obvious. But has Times Now come anywhere close to dethroning the top two channels? Seriously, given a choice between DD and Times Now, even Krishi Darshan is more fun. But Metro Now is a well-designed product, relatively clean product, and I guess still finding its feet. However, after reading Mumbai Mirror fairly religiously during my time down in Bombay, I still feel that the Mirror is still (and despite the number of people leaving) the best small-format paper in the country just because it is so delightfully vapid (but still tells you what big idiots the BMC are!), I find the Mid-Day a bit too crowded and confusing to navigate.
But their team of reporters (almost all from Today mind you!) and some editors do have some amount of street cred, and as with Papermint, I still believe it is unfair to damn a product which will be a daily on Day 1, and I must admit Papermint has improved a bit, and is getting slightly more newsy, but nowhere near the amount it has to be to displace other papers from the #2 business daily slot.
Just ask yourself, just how many papers is it humanly possible for an John (or in India, Jai) Doe to read in a day, and if you are a journalist, don't think as one. One mainstream and maybe one financial and a tabloid as a long-shot - like in Bombay (but it must be said in some homes, a second daily is now taking hold)? Or because there has been a fairly noticable improvement in ToI, which still remains staple #1 newspaper, will someone take ToI plus a second (HT) and skip financial dailies altogether but take a tabloid - like the Delhi market (Financial papers are weaker in Delhi). Hmmm, questions to ponder about.

Miss Shetty and ourselves.

The Shilpa Shetty incident highlighted by some Bollywood loving relations (of all of ours) who moved to the UK a couple of decades ago was supposed to highlight the seemingly second-class treatment that is meted out to brown-skinned people in the UK. Instead, it became a class-battle in India. Honestly, I don't have any sympathy for Shilpa Shetty (who, very honestly and I'm not being cynical, desperately needed a career lift - because I guess even she realised that being VJM's #2 squeeze isn't exactly the pinnacle of a career), who I would not call dumb. This woman has milked the situation very well, but really this is all about the upper-middle classes (or to be more blunt about it, the English-Classes) in India feeling slighted that an illiterate b**** had the gall to call one of them names. This is not about a newly aggressive post-colonial India.
Do we really make a huge hue and cry about Arab Sheikhs who work some our brethren (in the sense that we hold the same country's passports) to death building their massive towers and islands in the sea. No. You see, those guys are dark-skinned, mainly illiterate people from the villages - why should the city or even the media give a damn. Look at it, every second day, some guy (usually from a sub-continental country) falls off a parapet or a nurse/maid is raped. No, we don't give a flying f***. I will tell you why, and I know that some editorial writers have brought this up in the last couple of days, but I brought this up in November 2005 - read this post again. And I really don't think the situation has changed - anybody who went to the Herbie Hancock concert the other day will testify that the cops rolled over backwards if they saw a pink-skinned couple - even trailer trash.
Racism and regionalism are going to exist as long as the global gene pool doesn't merge into one, and I doubt that will happen for at least a millenia or two. My point here is with the other big news event - Sourav Ganguly (now, if I had to be really parochial - and I can be at times I would have spelt his name with a 'bh'). I have no clue why his Bengali-ness has to be brought out everytime. I like Ganguly as a player, I really do but I don't understand what 'Bengali-ness' has anything to do with it. Unfortunately, for Bengali's - the current symbol of Bengali-ness is to fake hunger-strikes. I mean, does Mamata Banerjee look like she went through a twenty-or-something day hunger-strike? Mamatadi, a small bit of advice, if you want to do a hunger strike, take some lessons from this one.
Anyway, I was genuinely surprised at ET on Saturday (even though the story was wasted on a Saturday) but a great story, the best of any paper about a relatively secretive and reticent organisation. The mess at Star India makes for a compelling story, expect a few more in the coming few days - and if Nair has gone off to join Karan Johar what does this mean for Koffee with Karan on Star World? And did anyone catch my school's most famous alum on KBC yesterday. I don't know, but SRK was good, but lacked that little something, maybe in the next couple of days he'll get into the groove.