Shooting from the hip- Indiantelevision dot com's Box Populi by Subhash K Jha

The pre-elections political debates continued non-stop. Some of them with politicians slinging mud at one another were downright ugly. The debating slots are so saturated, one can almost go from one channel to another with the assurance of constantly watching a set of high-profile politicians exchanging barbed insults.

What I like about NDTV India’s debate Humlog is that it puts the junta and its leaders on the same forum—very unlike the elitist Question Time India on BBC where, this week, journalists sat on their high horses to answer questions on Sonia Gandhi and election pledges. In Humlog they threshed the Ram Janma Bhoomi issue with a certain amount of candour and conviction. Islamic representative Syed Shahabuddin said it was just 36,00 square feet of land that the Muslims wanted. And why can’t the temple be built around or outside that little portion of land?

I’ve seldom seen the fundamentalists sounding so rational before. That evening all the fuming and fretting was left to Mahesh Bhatt who came on the video monitor to say he was partly Hindu and partly Muslim. "And you’ll have to cut me to divide my loyalties." Quite cut up, really.

Life is plastic: Not everyone on camera comes across as candid. Last weekend I watched the three new Miss Indias on Star News, and each one outdid the other in plasticity. They all spoke with conveyer-belt uniformity, unnaturally white-toothed grin and all. One of them wanted us to believe that potential film producers had lined up for her offstage even as the pageant progressed. Right.

Oh come off it! There’s a limit to how much one can believe from the pretty faces. Interestingly the three Miss Indias were interrupted in their evening reverie by a sudden story on the film Masti. Why couldn’t the ladies be packed off before beginning another story? Maybe they were being warned in a subtle manner about what to expect from and in Bollywood?

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Publicity begins at home?: Of late some commentators were heard sniggering about how Ekta Kapoor plugs her own feature films on her popular soaps. Sure enough, last week one couldn’t hear the end of her new film Krishna Cottage on Kahanii Ghar Ghar Kii and others soaps. Is that an unethical practice?

All in the family...

I’d say, no. Feature films these days are filled with brand endorsements. So why not the soaps? On Kahanii… we saw the newly married Shruti and Aryan discussing how they would miss Krishna Cottage before the couple took off for its honeymoon in Australia. And now after heavy-duty romancing and coy glances in the malls of Melbourne, Shruti spotted her mother’s lookalike swinging and sauntering across the road.

In theory, Kahanii... now has two versions of the protagonist Parvati, played by the ‘new’ Parvati, Jaya Seal and the old one Sakshi Tanwar. May the best Ma win!

Westwards ahoy!: Incidentally Kahanii… isn’t the only soap that has gone westwards. Sony’s truly splendid Hum To Chale Pardes about an NRI bride’s travails abroad, which is being re-telecast weekday nights, was shot in Australia trying to pass off as the US. If you haven’t watched this one during its first telecast then I suggest you watch the tightly woven tensions that unravel and ravel themselves among the bride, her disgruntled husband and his neurotic and suicidal husband.

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Ekta Kapoor’s new soap Kkoi Dil Mein Hai has turned a ‘coroner’. And I do mean coroner. Dead sentiments are being excavated . Romance is being rekindled between Kajal and Samay, who’s now married to her best friend Kruttika. Last week Kruttika saw Samay and Kajal locked in an embrace on the roof in the rain. And if that sounds like Vivek Oberoi and Lara Dutta’s drizzling song in the film Masti, then blame it on the filmy soaps.

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Neighbours envy, nations pride... not SRK the soilders han!

Jai Jawan: The star-audience rapport comes to mind in the light of what we saw on NDTV India’s Jai Jawan last week. Shah Rukh Khan decided to spend an evening with the troops at the border. Barkha Dutt was there to co-ordinate the interactive evening. But I thought the evening lacked that certain spark which ought to have brought sunshine into the soldiers’ lives.

Oh, they sang danced and joked with ‘King’ Khan. But he just didn’t seem to have his heart in it. To make it worse, Dutt asked the star to do an imitation of the Prime Minister.

"That would take too long," grinned Shah Rukh.

Ahem ahem. Too long, or too politically incorrect? Karan Thapar needs to get his sensitivity in place. I love his series of interfacial exchanges with very young achievers on BBC’s Face To Face. But he needs to change his way of communication. This week he asked the young cricketer on the show about his mother’s death of cancer.

"It must have been traumatic for you… Each day you saw her die slowly…" Oh dear. What was the interviewer looking for ? Besides tears and TRPs, that is.

Have you tried to sit through those fun-filled segments on magazine-shows with stars? They’re painful enough to make us wince bitten and twice shy. Didn’t Mahima Chowdhary the "extempore journalist" on Tuesday’s Bollywood Tonite make you wince and squirm, specially in the way she spoke to her Pakistani co-star when singer Alisha Chinai joined them and suggested that the actor looked Latino, Mahima simply took off, "Yeah he’s actually Latino pretending to be Pakistani."

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Do unto other what you expect others to do unto you: Sensitive issues like nationality shouldn’t be trivialiased. But I must admit this banter business can get suitably brilliant at times. On MTV Bakra a poor unit hand named Anurag was given the sickened-degree treatment by the three stars of Masti Vivek Oberoi, Aftab Shivdasani and Ritesh Deshmukh.

Actually Deshmukh just stood around while Shivdasani and Oberoi took on a mock-ireful trip about Shivdasani’s automobile. It all ended in fits of giggles as poor Anurag tried to look democratically amused.

So do Bollywood stars have a sense of humour? We wouldn’t know. Because the joke was on a poor unit hand. Wait till a star is made a bakra. Then we shall seethe.

(The views expressed here are those of the author and indiantelevision.com need not necessarily subscribe to the same)