Penblunt & Hogwash

Indian Market drives non-News

PENBLUNT

Being a scribe for a little more than two decades has advantages.

You could call up someone and ask: Hey, you got a job for me?

The Q&A then goes: What kind of job, mate?

So you spell it out.

I always wanted to be an environmental journalist, which at one time I was.

The thing about being an environmental journalist is that you feel so passionately about the environment and LIFE that you really do not care about the language. It ought to be carried in all languages.

In fact, in an Indian situation, you must do, because you know that everyone NEEDS to know this and understand this… so better if it is in an Indian language.

Thus it is that at a certain level of penury and joblessness, I asked a very senior person in a Hindi channel, a peer and friend: Sallay, naukri hai kya? (Brother, do you have a job for me?)

He went on predictable lines: What kind of job, mate?

Something to do with the environment, I said… may be not a job… may be you commission me a few programmes and pay for that… or may be a job dealing with your environmental programming…?

Nope, he said?

Why? Was he against helping a friend, as many a person is, relegating past to the back-freezer!

“Nahi ray…: he said haplessly… Hindi channels care nothing for environmental stuff…. Market nahin hain, yaar.

Friends, watch the special series on Climate Change on BBC now, this April, back-to-back with the global warming report released by the IPCC and American machinations to deny the hard, fast hotting reality, which the US wants to cover under a thickening carbon blanket.

Lest any of my unadmiring readers start thinking this is a surrogate autobiography and a tale of woes of a frequently-jobless scribe, this is really about something else.

The Indian media (TV) is having a field day… never had so many succulents been laid out on the table at once…. Supreme Court giving a controversial verdict on caste reservations, Sharad Pawar playing to the off side with Indian cricket and burying it, UP elections with a sting operation, a la Tehelka, showing all UP politicians (it did not have any Congress candidate on the hang list, though) as corrupt…and the rest of the rape… bribe... corruption menu, inter alia…

All of last week, BBC, or for that matter CNN and other international channels have been battering the air waves with programming on global warming, and especially how India, with others of our ilk suffering the worst effects of global warming.

Yet, let alone the Hindi TV media, the so-called most respected Indian English TV news channels have been sleeping with their pillows over their heads on the issue of global warming.

I know CNN has been doing a lot, but the BBC’s series on global warming has reconfirmed my faith on it as the global leader in sophisticated, scientific programming that has a pro-poor bias, clearly, a bias that can only be heart-warming.

The farmer in UP will have to shift his wheat field upwards, where there is no water… vegetation shift due to global warming…

The BT cotton farmer in Andhra will die… commit suicide…

Four years ago, a scientist in Shillong had told me that warm weather birds are not seen there anymore. Disastrous... because there is no food for those kind of birds in Meghalaya.

Did you know that chillies are not hot enough because chillies do not gather heat unless the rainwater ferments the soil underneath, from which the chillies draw their calories?

So all of the time till it rains, and IF it rains at all… there will be no chilly worth its name available…. And so the chilly growers, who have taken daadan, or blanket selling rights with top notch masala manufacturers, would have no market and may also commit suicide…

Nothing to consider… no heart… only TRP…. Sachin, Chappel… Saurav… Shastri… combinations of old and young, without understanding if a young has a dying heart (Dravid), or old hearts have the racing pulses (Sachin and Saurav), or empty hearts with schemes of eliminating India before it could confront Australia…

Nothing, from our hallowed Indian TV channels on the fact that we, as humans, have killed off our environment and are dying with it….

Nahi ray… market nahi hai yaar!

God curse! Ye Indian showmen and showmen who make money out of showmen!