Bright lights and high decibels — I am struck by this beautiful aesthetic correspondence between Diwali and news TV. So, on this day, allow me to set aside my usual weekly humble effort — trying to identify and then deconstruct the most sublime moments in a 24x7 news cycle — and explore that aesthetic correspondence. If everyday can feel like Diwali on news TV, what do news broadcasters remind you of on the day of Diwali?

NDTV: You know those things, sparklers on sticks? Almost always a little slow to light up; if you light a sparkler and a cracker at exactly the same time, the cracker always responds first. But once they are lit, sparklers burn steadily. They are said to produce a lot of stars. They have been around the longest. Safe and more or less predictable, and they are, therefore, supposedly preferred by “sensible” people.

CNN-IBN: Those things that also sparkle, therefore derived in some ways from sparklers on sticks, but they look quite different. Indeed, these sparklers — a shiny wrapper around a hard shell — seem determined to look different from the sparklers mentioned earlier. They get lit faster, but are said to produce fewer stars. They compensate for the fact that they don’t burn as long as sparkler sticks by having a more intense burn and by being less predictable: sometimes they explode, although we are told they are not supposed to.

Times Now: Rockets. You put rockets in empty receptacles and light their fuse, and you watch in absolute wonder — there’s no guarantee what trajectory they will take as they zoom out. They light up very fast, faster than either kind of sparklers mentioned above, but on being lit, they just produce one flash before they take off. So, just one star, really.

... contd.