And every night before she goes to bed, she bends down on her knees, clasps her little hands together and prays: Dear God, please let me not work in a TV channel again.
Of course there are perks.
-You get a great salary
-Your salary gets hiked over 50% every year (unless you have zero PR skills)
-You can snigger about all the people on prime time since the grape vine has told you what they're like in bed.
But the flips!
-Producers having to hunt for anchors at the Trade Fair at Pragati Maidan (sorry can't find appropriate link to Trade Fair)
-Anchors who have already spent hours in make up obsessing further about how they look on air (not all, of course)
-and the entire concept of TV analyses.
Television isn't the best medium to analyse anything; not even the Lakme India Fashion Week (lots of links here, predictably).
TV anchor Sreenivasan Jain just got designer Tarun Tahiliani to begin talking about how couture designers weren't put on the earth to rescue traditional handicrafts when he had to wrap his show, admitting that "we just got to what could be a whole new debate" and indeed was the first interesting thought generated on that programme.
Forget about political analyses. TV commentary in India, atleast, seems to equal rabble rousing. If the old favourite pet 'debates' such as BJP-RSS divide are worn thin, spin a new one -'Who's worse Dhaka or Islamabad?' Just when things get interesting, if indeed they do, "sorry we're out of time..." or better still, "sorry the line got cut".
On a recent debate on NDTV looking at India's relations with Bangladesh there was predictably no talk of any of the larger questions concerning our relations with this neighbour, already so ignored by virtue of our obsession with the Western counterpart. TV shows invariably feature diplomats and ministers, and treat Bangladesh like an evil neighbour. Treat border disputes like they are isolated incidents created independently of any larger Government directive, on the whim of the BDR.
Don't expect to find any of the larger issues raised, such as Bangladesh's apparent internal struggle with hardline elements such as Bangla Bhai raised recently, and most controversially, by Elisa Griswold of the NYT. Whether or not the threat is this imminent, worries about the rise of a militant Islamic influence are certainly real and there is undeniably a struggle between the AL and the BNP hugely influencing Bangladesh's politics, but on TV there's never enough time to get beyond pointing fingers. (Always at 'evil' Islamabad and Dhaka).
Which is why, I say, don't even try to analyse on TV. Keep it short and sweet. And pretty, like Headlines Today. Those who want analysis will wisely wander off to the Internet and Haroon Habib won't face the ignominy of being cut off in five words.
