Less talking, more shooting

: There’s a lump in the throat. It’s called the O-lump-ics. It appears on those rarest of occasions when an Abhinav Bindra wins a gold medal and the Indian national anthem plays, dissolving the lump into tears. It also occurs each time Doordarshan’s presenters refer to the Games as the O-lump-ics: today is Day 4 of the O-lump-ics, now we take you to live O-lump-ic action... This lump, however, does not dissolve into water; it solidifies into outrage at Doordarshan’s inability to pronounce Olympics — and many other words, names. The only way to rid oneself of this constriction in the throat it is yell at the TV set: O-lump-it.

The Olympic telecast was always going to be poor, once DD laid hands on it. But it just got worse. Everything that could be wrong, is wrong. Worse, while worldwide sports telecasts have advanced with electronic communications, Doordarshan has regressed to the 1980s.

Studio: The rest of the television world is using computer-generated effects and graphics. DD is draped in satin (?) Chinese curtains — red, yellow, red with dragons. One studio has a red table, the other mauve armchairs, toy mascots in red and green. Aesthetics, anyone?

Presenters: Execrable taste in clothes. Monday, one wore a pink shirt with a darker pink and purple check tie against the yellow and red curtains. Also, they talk too much, sometimes involved in 20-30 minute discussions.

Presentation: Confusing. Events are not introduced in a way that you can understand what an epee is, how it is scored and who the main contenders are. Sunday morning at 10 am for half an hour, all 16 live feeds died. The presenters swung into action, rattling off names, figures, timings, events, tallies, scores, finalists, first heat finalists (!) in every single event, followed by an even longer list of all the winners of each.

No photographs that we match a face and name to, not one graphic table with the scheduled events, not one timetable for the day’s telecast — nothing but words.

Coverage: Erratic. Whimsical (based on DD’s whims), confused and often meaningless. Live feeds mysteriously disappear; we join an event midway as we did on Monday afternoon in the single sculls rowing (men) or, take a commercial break just when the fireworks were about to go off at the opening ceremony. Then, DD engages in meandering conversations between, let’s say, a presenter and Suresh Kalmadi on India’s poor track...

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