Gobbledygook

Gobbledygook basically is pretentious unintelligible jargon.One can also call it double dutch.A bunch of baloney wrapped around in drivel topped up with more of macaronics and rigmarole. This blah-blah, hocus-pocus, chitter-chatter, jibber-jabber, mumbo-jumbo is hard to understand. See what i mean?

This uncharacteristic use of jargon is ideal to obfuscate data thereby making things deliberately unclear and might possibly give you a headache, if you read it over more than once. Comprehending it is another matter. Hence, its most easily found in corporate policy matters and even more or in government reports. It is the art of saying the simplest of things in the most twisted way possible, literally tying knots in a sentence.

Some samples of such government gobbledygooks are sampled below.Followed by their meaning in just one sentence. Can you decipher a gobbledygook?

Here is the first one.

It is clear that the Cabinet Committee agrees that the new policy is an excellent plan, in principle. But in view of the doubts being expressed, it was decided to record that ,after careful consideration, the considered view of the committee was that while they considered the proposal met with broad approval in principle, it was felt that some of the principles were sufficiently fundamental in principle, and some of the considerations so complex and finely balanced in practice that in principle it was proposed that the sensible and prudent practice would be to subject the proposal to more detailed consideration with and across the relevant departments with a view to preparing and proposing a more thorough and wide ranging proposal laying stress on the less controversial elements and giving consideration to the essential continuity of the new proposal with existing principles, to be presented for parliamentary considerations and public discussions on some more propitious juncture when the climate of opinion is deemed to be more amenable for consideration of the approach and the principle of the principle arguments which the proposal proposes and propounds for approval.

What does it mean ?

In precise,

The Cabinet is not in favour of the policy.

Page 127, Ji Mantriji, Vol 1

Now try this one.

Notwithstanding the fact that the proposal could conceivably encompass certain concomitant benefits of a marginal and peripheral relevance, there is a consideration of infinitely superior magnitude involving your personal complicity and corroborative malfeasance, with the consequence that the taint and stigma of your former association and diversions could irredeemably and irretrievably invalidate your position and culminate in public revelations and recriminations of a profoundly embarrassing and ultimately indefensible character.

In one short sentence,

If you let this proposal pass, prepare for a character assassination.

Page 155, Ji Mantriji, Vol 1

And one more.

Certain informal discussions have taken place, involving a full and frank exchange of views, out of which there arose a series of proposals which on examination prove to indicate certain promising lines of enquiry which when pursued led to the realisation that the alternative courses of action might infact, in certain circumstances, be susceptible of discreet modifications in one way or another, leading to a reappraisal of the original areas of difference and pointing a way to encouraging possibilities of significant compromise and co-operation which if bilaterally implemented with appropriate give and take on both sides could, if the climate were right have a reasonable possibility at the end of the day of leading ,rightly or wrongly to a  mutually satisfactory conclusion.

This simply means

We can make a compromise deal with them.

Page 103, Ji Mantriji, Vol 3

Ji Mantriji was an Indian adaptation of the British satirical sitcom Yes Minister aired on BBC. Ji Mantriji aired on Star Plus and featured Farooque Sheikh as Surya Prakash Singh, the minister of Administrative Affairs and Jayant Kriplani as the department’s secretary whose job was to bamboozle the minister with his trademark goobledygooks.

The examples have been taken from the book adaptation of the series ,Ji Mantriji: The diaries of Shri Surya Prakash Singh published by Penguin in 3 volumes.

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Star Plus cancelled Ji Mantriji because of low TRP's, despite it having a niche dedicated audience.

When cable came to India

Cable has been in India for more than 2 decades now. What many have forgotten is the arrival of it. When AsiaSat1 was launched in 1990, it was the first privately owned satellite communication network covering all of Asia. Its owners were a consortium led by three firms: the Hong Kong based Hutchinson Whampoa, Britain’s Cable & Wireless and China’s CITIC Technology Corporation. In 1991 Rupert Murdoch backed STAR TV launched a joint venture between Hutchinson Whampoa and its Chairman Li Ka –Shing.

What a lot of people don’t know is that cable was present in India a few years before the 90s too, albeit in a more crude and rudimentary form. Even before the arrival of STAR TV and the other satellite and cable networks, an informal, illegal, and unregulated form of cable network was already operating in India.

Cable had unofficially begun in India in 1984, spreading from tourist hotels to apartment blocks and finally to individual households. Videocassettes players, linked centrally to a cable network, fed the networks based on subscription. The numbers slowly crept upto 3450 such cable networks by mid 1990 .In four major Indian cities Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata- over 330,000 households had been formed ,totalling an audience of 1.6 million. A potentially massive market that hungry salivating capitalists would have dreams about.

In 1991, STAR’s package of four channels initially offered news, sports, MTV and general entertainment ;the target audience being the educated urban , middle-class viewer. Around the same time, the economy was liberalised by then Finance Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, when he presented the union budget in Feb 1991.This made India a very lucrative, emerging market which resulted in a scramble from leading global media companies like SONY,TNT,ESPN and CNBC to enter the Indian market. Subsequently there was a wave of Western programming that was lapped up by the average Indian viewer, who was starved of content for years because of the sole state broadcaster -Doordarshan.

Quite naturally, with the mention of cable comes to mind the cablewallah. Unlike the west, the satellite television didn’t spread with set boxes but through cable. It was delivered via cables and the local cable guys dealt with the households .Although dish reception is legal with licenses, cable redistribution is technically against the law. By an archaic Indian Telegraph Act of 1885, it is against the law to dig roads and lay cables without permission by the Telecom commission.

To circumvent this, the cable operators simply ran their lines over the streets and through the branches of trees and lampposts. The satellite and cable revolution was realised on the basis of this by-passing of law and the lack of the policing to tackle this flouting helped the setting up of an unorganised band of cable operators ,who simply set up satellite dishes at one end and with a few rudimentary wired network over the locality would beam programs and made easy money.

Add to those cables lines the overhead electricity wires and telephone wires. And now you know why we have such messy network of wires hanging all over the cities in India!

After a few years, the consolidation effect kicked in and the local operators with more financial clout acquired others or made them sub- contractors and expanded their business. This also resulted in investment in better networks and amplifiers for better signals. These cable operators are known as multi system operators (MSO) who started acting as middlemen who took signals from the broadcasters and passed them on to local cable operators. The cable operators interacted with the viewers, collecting payment and installing connections.

What is interesting is that nobody can keep track of the number of subscribers and the MSO’s deliberately underreported the numbers so that the cost can be kept down to the viewers as well as getting them more channels from the broadcasters who sold their channel for a particular fee a month. There was massive under –reporting and one person who saw its potential was Lalit Modi .He however could not rake in much moolah during India’s cable revolution.

In 1993, Modi established Modi Entertainment Networks (MEN), and entered into a joint-venture agreement to broadcast Disney content in India; the next year, MEN agreed to distribute ESPN across the country as part of a 10-year contract worth $975 million. These were the early days of cable television in India, and ESPN, like other foreign channels, needed local partners to collect revenues from the cable operators scattered across the country and he too would under-report massively.

The entire business was very shaky and the stranglehold of the cable guys and MSO’ like INCABLE NET of Hinduja Brothers continued for well over a decade. Remember the CAS system that was supposed to come in 2003/4? It was government’s way of regulating cable. They couldn't .But now, with the advent of individual satellite dishes for each subscriber, the industry is undergoing change again. Corporate players like Airtel digital, Tata Sky and Dish TV, offer the viewer more control of his choices, money and remote.

Note: most of the information was obtained by reading a very good book –New patterns in global television by J. Sinclair and Elizabeth Jacka ; Third picture from top by Vatsala Goel (Mumbai), a rooftop in Mumbai .

Roadies - 8

People watch reality television because of the Peeping Tom Syndrome.These shows provide a platform for 15 minutes of fame and notice. But several youngsters misconstrue this as the shortcut to popularity and a benchmark of success. MTV’s Roadies is an example of how the youth is thinking these days. Baffling as it is, all 18-25 year olds on these auditions now want to be models and Roadies. It is as if they acknowledge, ‘ We are stupid. We will go to gym, build physique and walk on ramp and open our mouth for spewing obscenities– We get famous – bingo!! ’

I am not a regular viewer of Roadies, but I do enjoy the auditions-purely for entertainment. It’s pure guilty pleasure. After the auditions, I do not care a whit as to who is in or out of Roadies .And where the heck they are put in. Hell or further down under. Truth be told, these are casting episodes of show rather than auditions- but it works and not for nothing is it the longest running reality show on Indian television.

No doubt judges on panel, are manipulative and try to wrest the upper hand and humiliate the participants. It is done intentionaly to make people uncomfortable .To separate the chaff from the wheat. But some of them are roasted and humiliated ever so deservingly. That later on they are cast on the very show, is however a liability and function of the format that feeds on creating tension by behaviour that is psychotic.

And the universal rule of reality TV holds true - that you can’t keep those without self respect down for too long.

And I will tell you exactly why people watch Roadies. Because as a guilt trip, those auditions are a treat to watch as we watch with voyeuristic glee at the deserved humiliation handed out on national television. Watching people confidently being so wrong in their priorities in life that you think you are in control sitting in front of a computer and logging on to youtube during work hours.

We love to bitch, love to hate, watch people sweat it out and empty their shallow souls in the hope of the short-lived fame it can bring it. But there is a lesson in this too. How many even after winning Roadies got a steady contract with MTV? Very few. And who is the most successful VJ on MTV right now? José. And José made his way working up from radio industry. Reality TV is a fickle.

Anyhoo, we watch on with crab mentality because some guys/girls richly deserve such a dressing down. More than anything else it’s fun to watch how wrong can people be about basic general knowledge. Confidently identifying that the current president is a man, getting state capitals wrong, not knowing what Ayodha is, trying to overcompensate for diffidence by wannabe dressing styles. How ashamed their respective schools would be to be their Alma maters. Maybe the Raghu/Rajiv put it correctly by saying that to straighten this generation; we need to close down all the call centres and gyms in first place.

I hope these people are not produced on a conveyor belt in India somewhere; else with such stupidity, god bless India!

Fiction can save television

FICTION CAN SAVE TELEVISION

The concept of seasons have come up in the Indian television milieu courtesy rampant adaptation of foreign reality show concepts ,but its just a misnomer as this is just because the duration of the reality shows can’t be over a stipulated number of weeks due to the concept of the shows .

Once the winner is found on a show, they quite simply move on to the next season ,which is easier as there is no read to go and write an entire season, but instead the need to just to hold fresh auditions for casting –be it for talent or celebrity based shows.

This is quite unlike the west where every ‘fiction’ show has an overarching storyline for a season and each studio or satellite channel renews the shows for the forthcoming seasons based on its popularity and ratings.

This is quite unlike the west where every ‘fiction’ show has an overarching storyline for a season and each studio or satellite channel renews the shows for the forthcoming seasons based on its popularity and ratings.

TV has to move from dailies to weekly shows, because it is impossible to create a 20-22 minute script that is entertaining day in and day out without compromising on content and quality .Looking back at the finest produced serials in India –Hum Log, Buniyaad ,Nukkad, Mahabharat, Ramayan, Circus,Wagle Ki Duniya, Shrimaan Shrimati,Malgudi Days et al and we find that all were aired once or max twice a week.

But the today, the quality of fiction writing has sunk to such depths that each episode is comprised of 2 dialogues and 1 monologue with jarring sound effects and pliagiarised soundtracks of hindi films.Each episode should tell a thing or two,else it’s just an insult to the viewers’ intelligence.I seldom find it on Indian television.

TV content should become so good that people don’t see television as a conduit or passage to the film industry. For that, TV has to raise the bar of its own performance, enhance its production values and push the envelope, tear it -if need may be. A lot of stars from the film industry have come into anchoring and judging on reality shows on television, because the money influx has been huge .But they are not in TV for the same reason as say Michael Douglas in ‘The West Wing ‘or George Clooney in ‘ER’ or Alec Baldwin in ’30 Rock’ who do quality work in TV despite being huge Hollywood stars, and they are able to do so on the back of quality fiction .

It’s such an empowering medium and its reach is humbling, yet the content remains shallow and misrepresentative of our times. There is a need that is unrequited, potential that is unexplored ; markets,fans and people waiting to be tapped and that is a huge opportunity in itself.Do you really think if given a choice,the youth would watch what currently is on television?Some major game changer ,say a major production house should see this as opportunity and delve in TV production,which respects the intelligence of the audience.

Fiction has reached excruciating depths ,but nobody seems to care.The channels never take a risk,never show content that can engage people and not make couch potatoes out of them.They don't have the guts for it ,not one single one of the general entertainment channels(GEC's).