Although it’s derisively referred to as the idiot box for the shallow, ephemeral infotainment it provides, the power of television news channels to expose ground realities in some of the country’s hidden areas of darkness cannot be matched by the print media.

A case in point is CNN-IBN’s excellent multi-episode documentary titled No Country for Children being broadcast over the past few weeks, which graphically depicts the mind boggling deprivations — pervasive malnutrition, poor schooling conditions, sexual abuse and corporal punishment — that the nation’s 480 million children, especially the 158 million under age five, are heir to. The programme unsparingly aired government schools without furniture, drinking water, toilets and in one depressing instance — surrounded by overflowing sewage.

Yet while emotions of shock, anger, and outrage aroused by the visual media can’t be generated by cold print, the economics of television news ensures the anger and indignation is short-lived. The No Country for Children episodes are punctuated by commercials plugging bling luxury products. One can’t help feeling that hyper-ventilating anchors and reporters of television news channels are mere actors playing a part for the reportedly astronomical sums they are paid. This sentiment is supported by the unwillingness of the celebrity anchors/editors of TV news channels to take a step beyond ritual lamentation and breast-beating about the callous neglect of the country’s children.

Repeated offers by this publication to the top three English news channels to make common cause with us for root and branch education reform have not elicited any response. Emoting faux concern they are unable to rise above petty prejudices and insecurities in the cause of the country’s much-abused children.

Mighty fallen

Less than a century ago, it was the world’s most powerful nation and the centre of the civilized world renowned for its poets, writers and litterateurs. But now with the sun having irrevocably set for the United Kingdom of  Great Britain and Northern Ireland, this former colonial power seems to be sinking into utter mediocrity.

Last summer an execrable novel titled 50 Shades of Grey written by a puddle shallow English housewife — one E.L. James — became a national bestseller despite a ridiculous story line, featuring every cliché and stereotype and loaded with sadomasochistic sex. With reported sales of 70 million copies, a number greater than the population of the sceptred isle (62 million), how this repetitive, boring and desperate to shock novel enthralled the descendants of Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth etc boggles the imagination.

Nor is the astonishing success of 50 Shades in Blighty a one-off case of summer madness. This autumn the latest Bridget Jones — a fictional woman character whose troubled emotional life spawned the bestseller Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and a globally acclaimed movie — novel Mad About the Boy has captured the imagination of Brits who seem to have resorted to greed, gluttony and sex big time. But although it’s considered stuffy to protest against the tidal wave of pornography sweeping the West and spreading through the internet imbalancing youth worldwide, a refreshingly straightforward columnist Melanie McDonagh offers some hope that all is not lost. Writing in the Spectator (October 12), McDonagh excoriated Mad About the Boy describing it as “mainstream stuff” gone sex-mad. “When sort-of respectable, everyday, institutional, middle-class elements start talking dirty and dressing like tarts, you realise that the rot really has set in,” she writes.

For your editor who spent almost a quinquennium in the UK several decades ago acquiring a very enriching education, tidings of the smut wave sweeping the country is depressing news. For all their faults, the Brits were a balanced people given to understatement and moderation in all things. Obviously, New Britain created by New Labour and jet-setting former prime minister Tony Blair is an altogether different society, sowing the seeds of self-destruction. How the mighty are fallen!

Flying coffin

Jitender Bhargava, former communications director of Air India, has rendered a valuable public service by writing The Descent of Air India (Bloomsbury), which fingers people in government who have sent the airline into a hopeless tailspin. Although Bhargava blames the BJP-led NDA government (1999-2004) for squashing a tripartite proposal which would have allowed a Tata-Singapore Airlines venture to acquire a 40 percent equity stake in Air India (AI) and run the airline,  and later the Congress-led UPA government’s civil aviation minister Praful Patel and his yes-man AI chairman V.B. Tulsidas for over-augmenting the AI fleet while liberally conceding India’s flying rights to competitive foreign carriers, the rot in Air India set in several decades ago.

As first editor of the country’s pioneer business magazine (Business India), your correspondent wrote the first ever detailed cover story on Air India over three decades ago. Even though at that time Air India had excellent managers such as Booby Kooka, Inder Sethi and Michael Mascarenhas, it was clearly obvious that the intent of politicians, bureaucrats, managers and the several employee unions was to convert the national airline to their own use. For the neta-babu nexus, control of Air India translated into huge aircraft purchases and bilateral flying rights commissions, free first- class travel, as also postings for relatives abroad in a period of acute foreign exchange controls. For employees, Air India offered fantastic salaries and perks. But for fare-paying passengers there was little else but rude service and arbitrarily decreed sky-high fares. Poor Indian workers forced to seek jobs in Middle East countries were charged the highest per seat mile fares worldwide.

As I predicted in my first and subsequent stories on Air India and Indian Airlines in Business India and later Businessworld, it was only a matter of time before these vested interests for whom the passenger came last, would destroy these airlines. Although a nationalist, I haven’t flown Air India since 1984. The only people who fly Air India these days are politicians and government employees who pay from the exchequer. The Descent of Air India adds additional proof to the mountain of evidence arguing for privatisation of this flying coffin.