There is something about the television medium that seems to appeal to the deepest narcissistic urges of the highest and mightiest. How else can one explain the ready willingness of people who routinely turn down interview requests of print publications — especially of EducationWorld — because they are too busy, to drop everything and speed post-haste to distant recording studios of television channels, to answer inane questions from rude interviewers more pleased by the sound of their own voices than of their interviewees?
This weakness for 15 seconds of fame on television was very evident at an imaginatively conceptualised episode of the weekly programme We the People beamed live from the campus of Stanford University, USA under the aegis of Barkha Dutt, managing editor of NDTV 24x7 on June 22. Typically, the format featured an expert panel and an audience comprised mainly of Stanford students and teachers. For this telecast, Dutt had also assembled a stellar cast of panelists which included professors from Yale, Harvard and the heads of a few American corporates apart from the peripatetic former Union finance secretary N. K. Singh and the equally ubiquitous advertising guru Suhel Seth, among others.
Yet this impressive panel of grey eminences proved to be an embarrassment, rather than embellishment, of the telecast. Given the perpetual constraint of time throughout her show, there was little leeway for any speaker to adequately state — let alone elaborate — an opinion. Consequently Dutt, usually charming and presentable, came across as a mike-grabbing interrupter with scant respect for the high profile cast she had assembled at Stanford.
Quite obviously, Dutt needs to get her maths right. A 55 minute telecast can at best accommodate four-five panelists, particularly as the compere also invites audience participation. Moreover common courtesy requires that eminences grise invited on the panel (entirely at their own expense as per NDTV policy), should be given the time and respect to state their case. But on the other hand, given their slavish enamourement with the television medium which transforms the otherwise inaccessible high and mighty into lambs bleating for attention, those who grace We the People deserve the school-marmish treatment they get.