I chanced across a lot of quirky things on TV news last week. Some of them were funny. CNN’s story on an American husband on strike because his wife wouldn’t ask their children to sleep in a different bedroom. Aaj Tak’s story on cops in Bareilly, UP, presiding over the marriage of runaway lovers; the police had first arrested the man on complaints of abduction by the woman’s parents.

Some of the stories were intriguing. Aaj Tak visiting a village on the Bengal-Bangladesh border gated off by the BSF for security reasons, with the result that no politician ever goes to campaign there and nothing ever gets done. CNN-IBN tracking down a blind man in Bihar who seeks alms so that he can help poor women get married and build temples and mosques.

Even some of the political reporting was quirky. Atal Behari Vajpayee visited Lucknow around the same time as Sonia Gandhi demonstrated in Rae Bareli how easy re-election can be. Vajpayee was slugged ‘‘BJP leader’’ in some TV news reports. ‘‘BJP leader’’—like Kalyan Singh or Lalji Tandon or Vijay Kumar Malhotra.

Competitive politics can be brutal. If your party keeps losing the plot after you have lost the election, if your party doesn’t know what to do with you, you may even lose an unexceptionable tag like ‘‘former prime minister’’. Sonia should probably be slugged ‘‘like a former prime minister’’. That should help news anchors make fewer excited references to how much she resembles her mother-in-law.

Quirky, too, was Varghese Kurien, interviewed on CNN-IBN. I never lost in any battle because I was always right, Kurien said with wonderful and slightly alarming self-assurance. The Kurien interview was good television. The reporter didn’t jump in during the pauses in Kurien’s answers. Some of the pauses, in fact, were an essential part of the answer: Asked about the quality of present political leadership, Kurien said the Finance Minister (pause), he is a good man; the Prime Minister (pause), he is good; the President (slightly longer pause), he’s good.

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