When India TV deploys two journalists to comprehensively report on water-logging in front of Amitabh Bachchan’s Mumbai house, you are not surprised. That’s what India TV does. When Star TV’s on-screen captions brusquely and brutally summarises Bastille Day as the day when prisoners were freed from Bastille (a bit more happened, actually) and when those captions also say that July 14 was the day France won its freedom (from whom?), you are not surprised. When history is put through the mill of live news TV, Star TV is one of the places you would expect to see the most interesting outcomes of that process.

But you are surprised, stunned, as a matter of fact, when a Pakistani guest on Times Now — he was referring to the Balochistan-related lines in the Indo-Pak joint statement — says for every Hafiz Sayeed in Pakistan there are a dozen in India, and Times Now carries on as if this is just another TV chat. C’mon Times Now, or at least give us a fair warning.

How are we supposed to know that you have quit doing the news TV equivalent of flying the flag, manning the border and hunting the bad guys? Even those of us not in need of evening news version of patriotism turn to Times Now for a few minutes when it’s Indo-Pak time. It’s fun. But on a channel where many sensible Pakistani points of view have been met with a rapid-fire indignation from the anchors, the one Pakistani intervention — they have one Hafiz, we have many — that deserved to be shot down went uncommented. What’s happening? Is lasting peace round the corner?

... contd.