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.

So, who’s not good, is a question I thought was pleading to be asked. Knowing Kurien, the answer may have generated a couple of headlines.

But the quirkiest thing I saw was a sentence across the screen when CNN-IBN was reporting on an event attended by Manmohan Singh and Amartya Sen. ‘‘Man bites Doc’’, I read. I have a simple question. How did that get in? That punning is a low art doesn’t make it abhorrent for journalism. When, for example, the Economist some years back captioned a pro-Nafta demonstration, ‘‘Nafta we hafta, or have problems thereafta’’, only the most sadly conservative grammarians among its readers would not have chuckled.

‘‘Man bites Doc’’ is not only not funny, not only is it silly, it was stupendously irrelevant given the story, which was really about a prime minister and a celebrated intellectual saying a lot of nice, grave things in a nice, pleasant setting.

Appalled as I was, I still didn’t think if the ‘‘poor dears’’ of TV journalism were ‘‘a little less shallow and...a little more thoughtful and educated, the cause of the media would be better served’’. These marvelously malevolent adjectives are courtesy a CNN-IBN journalist, whose letter on Express media columnists was published in this newspaper on March 29. Would that the critic had substantively critiqued what we try to do.