Doctoring the news?

Doctoring the news?
Shailaja Bajpai

A new-born baby girl, nobody in particular wants, is lovingly cared for by a nurse. Eventually, her reluctant father, Pappu Singh, comes and takes her away. You wonder about the quality of her future, if she has one. A young boy, Manoj, awaits the donation of the ‘right’ eyes. When a pair is finally donated, they’re the wrong ’uns. You wonder how long his sightless vigil will continue.

Meanwhile, in a simple but curious twist of fate, two brothers, Pritam and Swaran Singh lie side by side in a ward unaware of each other’s presence. Pritam suffered a head injury, Swaran hasn’t eaten in 15 days. Come back tomorrow, says the doctor to Swaran’s family. You wonder at the attitude of the doctor.

Hospital (BBC World), the television verite series takes you into the heart of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi and shows you how it pumps.

Here, we glance over the doctor or nurse’s shoulder and examine the patients. Together, they become our conduit through the mysterious world of India’s top medical institution. We look at the human predicament when faced with its own frailty. We see a hospital staff of extra and ordinary individuals who help save people but also turn their backs on them.

The naturalness of Hospital is a tribute to Miditech, its producers, to the staff of AIIMS and the patients and their relatives. Stylistically, the gentle pace and light touch, quite unlike the hysterical dramatics of most TV shows, is a welcome change.

Hospital is the quintessential human interest story. It brings you hope and a silent despair. The ominous quiet may be more frightening than the hullabaloo of many Indian hospitals. On the other hand, it might be too sanitary. Difficult to say after two episodes. Does the AIIMS we witness match our experience of it?

Hmmmmn. There is a rarefied air to Hospital at variance with grim reality. The AIIMS we know is overcrowded, overburdened, understaffed chaotic. The triumph of its staff lies in how it manages to bring a method to this madness.In Britain, where hospitals look like they have just emerged from a Dettol bottle, this genre of programme has a stamp of authenticity. But in India? Watch Hospital, definitely, but think about this dilemma, too.

Onto another new entrant. Aaj Tak 24 hours. The five-year-old news programme has progressed to a news channel. With a certain degree of success and sophistication. The transmission quality is excellent, the sets, colours and presentation, bright, cheerful and businesslike. The new batch of anchors/correspondents are young but near convincing: they don’t make glaring errors even though they remain fairly simplistic. But that’s television for you. The computer graphics, the charts, maps etc. are professional.

The content. The good news is that the major stories of the day make the headlines. There’s little to choose between news channels here. Aaj Tak... places more emphasis on events in the North, understandably for a Hindi news channel. It also tries to move out of Delhi at the slightest excuse. For, news and local human interest stories, like the one on a young man in Bhopal who duped hundreds of students in a coaching class racket. Now for certain vagaries: the cycle of news is confusing. The concept of clearly demarcated bulletins has been dispensed with in favour of a seamless flow. If you want to sit down and catch up with all the news of the day in one go, that’s tough. Also, there’s only news. That causes its own handicaps. All TV news channels recycle news constantly. Here the rotation is small tricycle type. Obviously, this should expand with time, obviously we expect to see current affairs shows which puncture and punctuate the news cycles.

Stylistic points: if you keep your eyes wide open, TV news anchors look identical across channels. They all wear jackets: no gender differentiation please, it’s unisex. Second, close your eyes tight, and listen. All but the very discerning will find it difficult to name the channel: they sound the same in language, tone and cadence. Which leads to the last point: Aaj Tak 24 hours tells it like it is. Aaj Tak used to tell it with a twist in the tale. Result? The well known brand may have a slight problem defining itself and differentiating itself from the others. Watch and see.

The Kumbh Mela: enormous amounts of coverage reinforcing the mystical, exotic sense of India. Replete with half-naked sadhus, sun-rising dips in the water, elephants and other animals, our news channels are doing their bit to remind us and the world that we really are like that. Only.

Mr Mahesh Bhatt blames TV for sensationalising the Bollywood-underworld connection of making connections where none exist. Certainly, TV news has dwelt lovingly upon the subject. Certainly, they have given it headline news when perhaps it doesn’t deserve such importance. But why is Mr Bhatt curiously silent on the print media which is equally good or bad? Though news channels maybe probing dead-ends, they did not arrest Mr Bharat Shah. The police did. And it was Mr Bhujbal, Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister, who told us first about alleged conversations between Chota Shakeel and Mr Shah. Not TV.

P.S. Should DD reconsider its links with B4U now that Shah, one of B4U’s main partners, has been arrested?