TELEPROMPT
Sania, Shoaib all over
Mannika Chopra

THE hot topic of discussion on the various channels this week has been the ensuing Sania Mirza-Shoaib Malik wedding, and the claims of Hyderabad-based Ayesha Siddiqui, who has been saying that the Pakistani cricketer had married her 10 years earlier. TV news has been overdosing on the impending wedding scheduled for mid-April, often at the cost of other legitimate news spots. Too much, too much, the couch potatoes groaned collectively, as they watched yet another frame of Sania and Shoaib addressing the press, countering the allegations of a bespectacled Ayesha, who was always heard but never seen live on TV.

A wholesome Ayesha (seen in still shots), supported by friends and family and a sympathetic media, stuck to her guns and said that Shoaib not only married her but she even became pregnant. Unfortunately, she had a miscarriage. Of course, some channels apparently didn’t know the difference between a miscarriage and an abortion, but these were piffling details in the on-going saga of the great wedding scandal. Suddenly, primetime news began looking like a cross between E News and ESPN with assorted Pakistani cricketers giving their views on the matter and repeated loops of Shoaib Malik accepting congratulations on his ‘earlier’ wedding at an international cricket match venue.

If smart people wanted a haven from hard political news, this was the week. But if you were addicted to stupidity, well, then you should have watched India TV which, against the backdrop of Amar Chitra Katha-type lurid graphics, posed 40 questions that the police in Hyderabad asked Shoaib. Apparently, the Siddiqui family had pressed criminal charges against Malik, resulting in this Q and A approach on India TV.

Headline News aired us some sneaky shots taken though a half-closed door of the couple dancing. Back in the studio anchor Rahul Kanwar interviewed a completely clueless Sanna Bhambri. The not-so-famous tennis player said many, many times she didn’t know what was going on and wondered how could Sania look so happy and dance when such serious charges were being levelled against her fianc`E9 (Question: Why get specialists who have nothing special to say?). Even staid old DD News started of with the Sania-Shoaib nuptials on the day there had been a blast at the American consulate in Peshawar, killing 40 people.

Earlier on in an exclusive footage, which was used, and surprise credited by other channels, Star News caught the couple in the verandah of Sania’s home. Shocking! Proving the exception to the rule, NDTV 24X7 preferred to focus on the Food Security Bill, and later the Right to Education. So was TV, yet again, in danger of losing it? As Sagarika Ghoshe said in a perceptive discussion on CNN-IBN’s Face the Nation on privacy and public lives, the story had all the elements of a great media story — love, betrayal woven into potentially the most famous Indo-Pak wedding.

So why shouldn’t the media go in overdrive? Besides, the Indo-Pak coverage of the event propelled this routine celeb scandal story on to another level. Being a Pakistani, Malik may have been consciously, or unconsciously, painted as a duplicitous villain by the Indian media. Interestingly, in Pakistan itself Ayesha was garnering most of the public and media sympathy. lt took reality show anchor Minnie Mathur and Zeenat Shaukat Ali, an Islamic scholar from Mumbai, to spell it out. The excessive coverage of this tamasha was out of focus, unnecessary and 10 days before a 24-year-old’s wedding, a tad distasteful.

But long before her first engagement to childhood friend Sohrab, and its subsequent termination, and now her second betrothal, Sania has never been far away from the headlines. As a young, good-looking, promising tennis player — a promise which she has never fulfilled — she has been the subject of intense media scrutiny. Supremely articulate and with a noticeable sartorial sense — short skirts and large hoop earrings — she always had guaranteed celebrity status despite the fact that she has been winning fewer and fewer tennis matches.

Like politicians, celebrities need to be noticed by the public to stay in office and retain their celeb status. And Sania has always been noticed. So, for her to revolt against the presence of cameras, and tell the media to calm down, is somewhat misplaced. But it is equally misplaced for TV to pre-judge a situation, arm itself with inadequate research and present rumour and innuendo as fact and indulge in a quantum of coverage, which is completely disproportionate to the news worthiness of a story.