Good news for the chaps in Beijing who have been publicly and no doubt privately worried about Indian news TV’s coverage of China. News TV hasn’t shaved off 70 per cent of China’s GDP, has it? So, stop worrying, you guys in Beijing, and start wondering about Americans, who, had they watched CNN-IBN’s Face the Nation on agitating IIT professors , would have suffered a crisis of confidence unparalleled in their or any country’s history.

I had a crisis of confidence myself. What is America’s GDP? Fourteen trillion dollars, or thereabouts, that’s what I knew. But CNN-IBN, while asking an IIT prof why IITs should want pay scales like MIT’s, told me America is a four trillion dollar economy. And no one objected, not the IIT prof, not the other prof who wasn’t agreeing with the IIT prof, not the ex-IITian whose book’s now going to be a film. What do these smart people know that I don’t?

They know that in news TV, ten trillion dollars are not big enough to interrupt a chat. You don’t say, er, excuse me, you said America is a four trillion dollar economy, but actually it is fourteen trillion. That’s bad form. It doesn’t matter. Don’t obsess over details like that. Let the show go on. Which is no doubt why when the prof who wasn’t agreeing with the IIT prof said 77 per cent of Indians live on less than Rs 20 a day, no one objected either. That’s an even smaller matter, folks. India’s economy is after all only a shade over a trillion dollars. Within minutes of a half-hour news TV show, nearly 80 per cent Indians have been reduced to living on less than Rs 600 a month and America’s economy has been shrunk by more than two-thirds. Without a debate. Without dissent.

... contd.