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Amrita Tripathi

Author / Founder/ Former Journalist

Books by Amrita Tripathi

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My first column on television news, for The Reel on Scroll.in is here on their site, and below...Comments are welcome!

 

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CHANNEL SURFING
On the small screen, the big picture isn’t always visible
With so many different versions of breaking news, it’s hard to get perspective, says our new fortnightly TV columnist.

Television news is stressful business. I didn’t know until recently just how traumatic it can be as a spectator sport. It’s not even a question of weeding out your favourite news channel from the wealth of choice available (about 400 channels at last count).

English news channels are constantly amping up their game, trying to find new ways to convey excitement. If multiple screens, blues and reds, and tickers and capitalised headings weren’t enough, graphics are constantly swishing across channels so that you know that Things Are Happening. Presumably, a seizure is a small price to pay to know what the breaking news of the day is.

It’s been a while since the last bastion of calm and reason – the news anchor – has crumbled. It’s not just 9pm anymore. The daytime is also being prevailed upon to be forceful and shout-y. Perhaps the re-branding of post-lunch shows – long presumed to be the time when people are watching on mute – as Afternoon Prime Time is a sign of the times. With so many different versions of breaking news multiple times a day, it’s sometimes hard to get some perspective. If you’re not a news junkie, you’re probably not flicking channels obsessively to see what the big news is.

For instance, in the space of one afternoon, there was a heated commentary on the fate of Indian prisoner Kripal Singh, dubbed “Another Sarabjit”, on Times Now, CNN-IBN focused on the Bombay High Court as it deliberated on the IPL issue, while India Today was breaking news of a secret K4 ballistic missile launch, which, we learned, had been carried out the previous month. It was breaking on this day because the channel had accessed unpublished images of the launch. (I found the golden mike distracting, but perhaps I’m not yet used to it).

Perspective is a tricky business, but if you do channel surf, you’re likely to get a fuller picture. The news is mainly bad news. While channels do their part to convey the scale of the problem, say in Marathwada, where Rajdeep Sardesai went for India Today to chronicle the drought, television cameras sometimes very powerfully bring home what is happening across our country.

But television news doesn’t always give you the full picture. The decision of where to point your camera or where to release resources for your reporters and star editors to travel is a very calculated one, and takes into account audiences and potential ratings as much as the given news peg.

Boxers or briefs?

What television does well is present a developing story. We tend to turn to the news when there is genuine breaking news (a fact that has kept CNN a portentous force in the United States of America even when it normally lags behind its competitors). When an earthquake recently struck Myanmar, causing massive tremors in Kolkata, Guwahati and Patna, the instinctive tendency was to tune in to television to hear what the experts were saying. Increasingly, we supplement this with our dependence on print or digital, or social media, though the latter is notorious for not always being reliable.

But television also gives us access to people we want to know more about even if we didn’t know we wanted to. On April 1, I watched a fabulous interview by Shekhar Gupta for his Walk the Talk show on NDTV with the Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal at their school campus at DPS RK Puram in Delhi. It was unexpectedly free-wheeling and full of laughter. These guys have been friends since Class XI and clearly understand each other. This was an interview in which everyone was at ease and appeared to enjoy the conversation without trying to score brownie points or come off as cleverer than the other.

More recently, the other riveting interview was by Prannoy Roy on NDTV24x7’s India Questions with the very watchable Shah Rukh Khan. Not just because SRK took questions from the audience, including “Boxers or briefs?” Khan’s reply: “Depends who’s wearing them.” (Briefs, if we must know. “Death before boxers,” apparently.)

The light-hearted banter was a bonus, including Khan telling Roy that he wasn’t doing much work that evening. The production wasn’t as spiffy as one would have expected, with some lighting issues, but even so, it pales in comparison to the fact that Khan had apparently decided not to go to any other English news channel. Khan did riff about wanting to get NDTV good ratings. His appearance itself would have done the trick, if not his attempts to get the venerable Dr Roy to shake a leg, or even remove his shirt, which Khan promised to get him to do next time round.

Amrita Tripathi is a recovering news junkie. She has worked at CNN-IBN for nine years and The Indian Express for two years. At times, she may have a glancing familiarity or more with the news players mentioned.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

**(NB fyi: The question from the "audience" was from SRK himself, seated in the audience, to himself, on stage. As a "fan", that is.)

 

 

 

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Catching up...

Happy Holi, all! Hope you had a fun, safe, colourful day...whether you played or no! What's not to love about a long weekend, eh?

Catching up on here, with a little house-keeping and such-like. Also here's part of an interview with a wonderful debut writer, Arjun Nath, a recovered addict, who takes us on quite a journey with 'White Magic'.

As always, let me know what you think... and if you do get a chance, highly recommend you read this book!

 

MEET THE WRITER

First person: Untold stories from the author of a brutally honest book on recovering from drugs

‘There’s always been this thing that will comfort you, which is the drug, which is not there anymore’.

Its hard to come away from White Magic without rooting for the author Arjun Nath, without marvelling at the safe space that is Land, a rehabilitation clinic apparently like no other, run by a man affectionately called Doc. Its harder still to meet the young writer and ex-addict without being equally impressed by how articulate he is about his journey from addiction, including multiple attempts at rehab, as well as his passion and belief in an inter-connected universe.

We wouldnt even be discussing this if it didn’t seem so germane to his transition from being a smack addict to a recovered ex-addict and a writer, with one book out and another in the works. Being a writer is clearly an identity that gives him more joy than the slightly more regimented life of a corporate lawyer, a previous identity that has been all-but-discarded.

The book itself – which started as a biography of Doc, aka Dr YusufMerchant, the driving force behind a rehab and year-long rehabilitation programme near Kalyan in Maharashtra – is part-biography, part-memoir in its final form, and wholly readable. Naths fourth attempt at rehab has by far been the most successful, as he has been clean now for six years.

Talking to Nath, Im shocked to learn that even in a privileged, upper-middle-class setting, there was no awareness about methods of detox. Nath says he tried to quit cold turkey several times, not knowing that there were medicines that could help. Theres a wisdom in him that belies his 30-something years, and a confidence when he speaks that is worlds away from the young man he describes in the book who had low self-esteem, and essentially a hole that needed to be filled with his drug of choice. Excerpts from a conversation:

You are sharing something thats incredibly personal, and its also a very tumultuous journey. How do you feel about the book being done?
It’s somehow tied in with this whole getting sober process for me. It’s about going to rehab where there are so many changes being made every day, little things, you’re learning so much about yourself, about how you interact with the world around you, about your relationships and then you think that since you’re making these massive changes in your life and embarking on this, you know, new life, maybe you should make some new choices while you’re at it?

Because you know, who gets the chance to say I no longer want to be a lawyer… or I no longer want to be associated with this entire bunch of people. Since we’re changing stuff, let’s throw some more stuff on the bonfire!

That was fantastic, so in a way you take that leap, you make that leap and you say, I want to live a life, sober and be aware of what’s happening around me, painful as that may be at times. I no longer want to live in this bubble where nothing penetrates.

And since you’re doing that, let me just try and see, this is something I’ve always wanted to do – I’ve always wanted to write a book… can I make this a career? And you don’t know if it’s going to work out for you, whether it’s going to make you happy.

And then you find slowly… that maybe it does. Maybe this day that I stayed clean and not got absolutely blown out of my mind was a good day. Maybe this day I’ve spent writing 500 words without any expectation that I’m going to have deadlines to meet, or salaries to come in, or bosses to deal with – maybe this is a good day as well.

And those things progress for me, step by step, all simultaneously, hand in hand. So when the book finally came out, or when HarperCollins accepted it, it felt like validation of all those days that I had those doubts – is this going to work out?

Five years I lived with that. Is this something that’s going to work out? And all of a sudden, boom, yeah, you get that absolute rush, it is such a rush, absolutely fantastic.

I want to come back to Dr Merchant, who sounds like such a force of nature, incredible. Hes been so instrumental in helping you change your life. You say you temper some of what he says with what other people say about him – how does that process work?
Right. It’s hard actually. I think most people who have half a brain who go to rehab, especially this one – everybody goes through that process of first being hostile towards Doc, because you feel threatened that he’s going to change stuff about you, your life, from maybe listening to what he says. Then you go to thinking this guy may have a point, to respecting him, and then to the other end of the spectrum entirely, he’s on a pedestal for a lot of people, even people who’ve left ten years ago.

They’re tongue-tied or in awe of him. He’s just everyone’s buddy, though you may not be that way to him. It’s hard not to be in awe of somebody who’s so… he’s got a tremendous personality, a lot of colour. It’s just hard. So that was a tricky bit. How not to feel like this is some sort of cult-worshipping tribute to this guy!

Did you have to check and correct and go back and double check with other people how hes been or is he very upfront?
This guy, one of the big beliefs of his life is that sharing makes everything better. I know stuff about him that most people don’t know about their spouses, their kids, just because he’s so open to talking about it. He’s doing it for himself, he totally gets this… How do you live this incredibly hard life without sharing things? He shares constantly.

At times it got damned annoying because I just wanted to get away from him after a while. It’s like come let’s talk and three hours later you’re still talking, or listening, or recording stuff or writing stuff. It was very cathartic for him as well, I like to think it was helpful for him as well. So it was great. He actually doesn’t stop talking about himself.

Read the whole article here on Scroll.

 

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