Televista
A disciplined newsreader
Amita Malik

LAST week-end we paid tributes to Tejeshwar Singh, one of Doordarshan’s best known faces in the seventies. Tejeshwar was educated at St. Stephen’s in Delhi and Balliol College at Oxford and it showed in his newsreading. But there was much more to Tejeshwar than intelligent, imaginative newsreading. He showed his principles as well. Three hours after the Emergency was declared, he was asked to mention it in the news headlines and after. Being a disciplined person, Tejeshwar did not indulge in melodramatics right then.

But as soon as he finished the bulletin, he got up and said: "I shall never read the news again". Most aptly, last week-end the channel Times Now was telecasting the programme on the evolution of news on TV in its admirable series ‘Total Recall’. One saw Tejeshwar actually getting up from his chair in the studio and making that courageous statement. TV soon lost him to publishing. After a stint with publishing companies, Tejeshwar founded his own Sage Publications and brought out some books on communications and the media.

All this was a reminder on the role of a newscaster in a democracy. He or she is required to be apolitical as well as detached. But Tejeshwar showed that when the occasion arose, the newscaster can protest. Of course, there are also instances of both political parties and newscasters acting a little differently. There was an example, not so long ago, of a well-known Hindi newscaster who was the lead newsreader in an independent channel. He was persuaded by the political party which then came to power at the Centre to cross over to Doordarshan, still a very sarkari channel. As soon as that government fell, he was back with the independent channel and has remained there, although it remains to be seen what he will do if that party comes to power again.

However, there are channels which make no secret of their political views. This is particularly true of South India, where channels are not only run openly by political parties but they take their names from their leaders, such as the Jaya channel. At times of political crisis they fight their own battles and are interesting to watch. In the north, east and west of India, too, channels claim to be neutral and newscasters also follow suit. But here and there, their political sympathies certainly show through.

Now interesting things are happening across the border in Pakistan, where President Musharraf has been playing his own games with TV and radio channels. But here our colleagues across the border are putting up a spirited fight. Channels are closed down from time to time, and like judges, inconvenient electronic mediapersons are also thrown out and forced to leave. But with courage they keep up the fight, to our great admiration, and democracy survives.

Everybody knows that we have our own version of English, especially as far as the media is concerned. Bowling becomes "balling," and so on. But there are distortions of some words which are not only puzzling but also misleading. For instance, it beats me why both in Hindi and English news and programmes, Olympic is pronounced as ‘Ollum-pick’ and Y made into U. This goes on without any checks, and it seems strange since the word is used quite often in view of the coming event in Beijing. Why is the word distorted? A little more understandable and even amusing but still absolutely incorrect is how the Indian media has made the Macmahon Line into our very own ‘Mach-Mohan’ line. The gentleman in question, whose version of the border has led to such controversy, was British, and the second half of his surname was Mahon. So we have no business to convert him into ‘Mohan’ because that is not only incorrect but bad for the records.