In your saner moments, you may not believe this is a match made in heaven but who’s talking about heaven? This is the very latest trend on TV soaps — just a week ago, innocent and beautiful, illiterate and impoverished Vidya married a young scion of a business family who is equally attractive to look at but whose beautiful mind is disturbed ( Dulhan, Zee). He has the nicest possible mother, the worst possible (step?) sisters, a caring cousin and the newly-wedded Vidya who sees Adonis in him. Well, Shah Rukh Khan, then. Yaani ki, the sun and the moon and the stars shine out of his slightly dazed eyes.

Imagine, as John Lennon’s advised you to, that Tulsi is the young girl we once knew her to be before she became the mother of all mother-in-laws — that sweet innocent girl who was working hard to provide her family with a living and in this quest finds herself the object of male sexual harassement which gives her a bad reputation that leads her mother to believe a fate worse than death (marriage to a 40 year old man with a young child) is preferable, imagine that suddenly she receives a proposal for marriage to the oldest son of one of the city’s richest business families all because his mother has spent one night in her chawl and taken a fancy to her conversation — not to mention her culinary skills when it comes to poha. Imagine further that her intended groom is somewhat challenged. And now take a Marion Jones leap of the imagination and imagine Parvati’s Om as Tulsi’s challenged husband. It’s asking too much but that is precisely how it is in Thodi Sa Zameen Thoda Sa Aasmaan (Star Plus).

At one level you might laud these efforts because there are many people in this world who have challenges of one kind of another (who doesn’t). It isn’t the theme that is objectionable, though the fact that these poor needy girls are forced into such marriages out of force of circumstance is highly questionable. It’s the portrayal of these characters. People with mental challenges do not have to behave like half-wits. Or look like them. Vacant, eyes, expressionless faces, childish behaviour can also be avoided. Ditto goes for stutters and mutters. Ba, Bahu aur Baby (Star Plus) is one serial that makes a tremendous effort to seriously and with utmost sensitivity treat the characterization of a young man with mental challenges but it still singles him out in the above manner.

Of course it is unfair to blame the serial producers when our Hindi news channels behave as though the entire country has gone mad. Last Saturday night, Aaj Tak spent the entire evening in the company of a snake. Even as Musharraf was shaking Manmohan warmly by the hand, Aaj Tak ran this ‘story’ about a compulsive obsessive reptile who was following a young boy and wanted to know what could be done to make him go away. The villagers held havans and aartis but the snake was having none of it. He was sticking around to enjoy the media coverage — didn’t we see him tilt invitingly towards the camera?

The one subject that rivals such coverage in terms of lean meat on the mind is cricket coverage when a match has been rained out. Watch Tony Greig, Kapil Dev, Arun Lal seeing the same TV shots of a bouncer hitting Sachin Tendulkar on the helmet, from different angles for the nth time and come up with different ways of saying that he misjudged the length and height of the ball and went smack into it. Whatever you knew about cricket and the English language is unlearnt in a moment.