|
 "Do
me a favour….let's NOT play Holi." Like Mr Amitabh Bachchan
who decided to stay away from all Holi celebrations this year I
felt like doing the same after watching the excessive zeal with
which every soap took to the festival of colours.
Everyone
from Tulsi to Kareena had a squeal-day. The whole Star Parivar got
together to whoop it up in a programme called Rang Barse,
for God-only-knows what purpose. I mean, Holi came later during
the week. So how could we believe what they were doing up there
wasn't just play-acting?
 Zee's
Kareena Kareena which so far seemed to be inspired by Sooraj
Barjatya's film Maine Pyar Kiya (the pure-as-driven-snow
middleclass lass living under the same roof as the spoilt heir-apparent)
turned to Yash Chopra's Darr for inspiration during Holi.
Remember
how Shah Rukh Khan gate-crashes incognito into Juhi Chawla's Holi-than-thou
get-together in Darr? In Kareena Kareena, the heroine's
silent admirer disguises himself as a Sardarji to be part of her
celebrations, right under the home medium's Salman Khan's unsuspecting
eyes.
In
this way, the symbiotic relationship between the two media continues
to thrive. But what happens to the celluloid deities when they descend
on television? Last week I was flummoxed by the contradictions indulged
in by Salman Khan whom I caught on two different news channels on
two occasions in two totally different contexts.
****
 On
Aaj Tak, the correspondent Manish Dubey was so grateful to have
Salman he blabbered on about the star's decision to not work with
Aishwarya Rai, when in fact the decision came the other way. Salman
pointed it out to the over-excited correspondent.
At
the press conference on India TV in support of Aman Varma, Salman
chuckled and chirruped , smiled and sneered at the correspondents
who had gathered there to celebrate the end of privacy on the couch
potato. Salman made fun of the correspondents who he claimed had
watched the footage minutely.
And
why should they not? They were, after all, liable to be grilled
by a group of stars who behaved as if the press was guilty of unfair
practices en masse.
****
|
Interactive
star-press conferences on TV are always dicey. The stars
always seem to be arrogant even when they don't mean to
be. I watched Pankaj Pachauri's extensively interactive
debate Humlog on NDTV India with much interest mainly
because it tried to tie up Rajat Sharma's exposes with other
associated ideas including the moral boundaries that the
press should draw, and the charges against Madhur Bhandarkar
last year.
In
fact the best line on the show came from Preeti Jain the
lady who accused Bhandarkar of rape. When a male member
of the congregation drew attention to the provocative clothes
woman wore to seduce women she retaliated, "Excuse
me, a woman can dress any way she wants. That doesn't mean
any man has the right to touch her."
Touche. Smriti 'Tulsi' Irani wasn't in the studio. But she
spoke on the video monitor and objected to women being compared
with market commodities. Smriti also took the opportunity
to praise NDTV for not showing sleazy material in the garb
of investigative journalism.
|
****
This
was compere Pachauri's queue to lapse into some heavyduty selfpraise.
He spoke about how his channel has a 12-page guideline on the
dos and don't's of journalism.
I happened to mention this to India TV's big boss Rajat Sharma.
"Let the other channels have more such guidelines so we'd
know exactly which rules to break," Rajat retorted.
India TV may have gained an advantage eyeballs by grabbing viewers
by their balls. But the channel now needs to consolidate its position
and strengthen itself further, for example the entertainment section
which needs serious looking into. This week I caught actress Udita
Goswami promoting her new film. She goofed up grandly by mentioning
Jism in place of her own film's title Zehar.
Just goes to show which way her and her producers' minds were
working. Stranger still was the correspondent who naively attributed
Neha Dhupia's oft-quoted statement on sex and Shah Rukh Khan being
bestsellers to Mallika Sherawat. And no one batted an eyelid!
****
Oh dear. Caught a rather interesting satire on Star One in the
weekend telefilm slot. Tigmanshu Dhulia's film tried to show the
nexus between Bollywood and the underworld in a satirical format.
Dhulia succeeded primarily because the cast seemed to get a hang
of the material better than one would expect on television .
The plot about a unit which loses the prints of a film financed
by the underworld and must quickly put together a new film as
replacement, took digs at all the stereotypes of our cinema ,
like the self-absorbed leading man, the intelligent leading lady
acting the bimbo with the producer, and the over-sexed character
actress (played to immense effect by Anita Kanwal).
I wish this serious satire was seen by more people. Tigmanshu
Dhulia had started his career as a telefilm-maker. Is he a back
a full circle? Cinema's loss is TV's gain, huh?
 I
loved the little girl Devika's interview on the Disney Channel
with choreographer-director Farah Khan. The lady spoke to the
girl, woman to woman. No effort was made to treat her like a child.
The twosome laughed, played games and Farah even taught Devika
the Disco steps from Kal Ho Na Ho. "You dance better
than Preity Zinta," joked the choreographer-director.
Karan Johar in chatty conversation with Priyanka Chopra and Arjun
Rampal surprised me with how much at home he has become as a TV
anchor. While Priyanka and Arjun fought incessantly, Karan smiled
and giggled at their childish banter. The real surprise was Arjun.
Always too cautious to be interesting, he opened up on Koffee
With Karan like never before, making forthright comments on
the casting couch, about being propositioned by men and women,
about Aamir Khan and about, ahem ahem, Mallika Sherawat who according
to Arjun, didn't need any change since everything on her person
had been changed already.
Ouch.
(The
views expressed here are those of the author and indiantelevision.com
need not necessarily subscribe to the same)
|
