IT's coming out of your ears

IF we fancy ourselves as an information technology power we must have an IT media house to cater to our young software sultans, musn't we. So the Bangalore-based Technology Media Group has decided to fill the vacuum with its IT portal, Indian IT Online (www.indianitonline.com), its magazine called CIO (for chief information officer, in case you are not sufficiently clued in) and its 24-hour TV channel, TMG Enter. The channel was unveiled last year and has the distinction of being the only thing of its kind, an IT parallel to CNBC. Just as well. One is bad enough.

It is curious to see how a non-fiction channel that is not news, goes about filling up 24 hours. Forget 24, at the end of an hour and a half you have enough IT coming out of your ears to last you the whole month. We are single-minded over here so you have "IT Hour", "zindagi dot com", "Celwebrity", "E-zindagi", "E- jaankari", "E-karobar", "E-samachar" - well, you get the point. There are interviews with IT executives of assorted shapes, sizes and specialisations, campus interviews with IT aspirants, and a constant reading out of the profiles of companies that are looking for recruits.

And since 24 hours is still a lot of time to fill after you are through with all that - there are no soap operas, no music countdowns, no movies and not too many ads - there are lots and lots of websites that get lots and lots of attention on this channel. Not Indian websites particularly, all kinds of stuff fairly indiscriminately chosen. If there are two words that can describe TMG Enter, it is amaterish and noisy. There is an endless flow of graphics that are far from classy, and an equally endless flow of chirpy anchors with sing-song delivery.

My favourite is the girl who does website reviews for a programme called "Dot Tube". She wears a dress or long skirt each time, and clasps and unclasps her hands for what seems like an entire half hour as she walks you earnestly through almost every single link on virtuous websites about the environment, pets and such like. I forget her name. Websites that receive treatment from her do not need to advertise. In fact they are probably embarrassed at the over-exposure.

There is also Karl, who likes to come on and be jovial. TMG Enter may be high on IT, but its pretty low on channel aesthetics, with its garish colours and clunky logo and graphics. And its young anchors are fairly gauche. They all need lessons in professional anchoring, and in how not to look like they have just wandered on to the sets from a Bangalore shopping mall.

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How deeply ironical it is that a royal family that kept its secrets so well that the extent of disequilibrium within it took the country and world totally by surprise, should now have its dirty linen hung out to dry on the Internet. The report of the inquiry commission on the massacres within the Narayanhiti Palace is on the Web for the world to read, crisp and colourful in its detail. "HRH the Crown Prince in combat fatigues entered the billiard hall and fired at the ceiling and West wall with a 9mm Caliber MP-5K automatic sub-machine gun and then fired rat-tat- tat at His Majesty the King who was then standing at the east end of the billiard table".

There is enough there to lay open personal details of whom the Crown Prince called, what he smoked and where he retched, as the newspapers have reported, yet this is only the synopsis. The detailed report too is on the Web, but in Nepali. They have taken care not to put out a translation of that in English. At www.ntc.net.np. The site opens with a picture of the plumed crown, the colour of the page is appropriately purple (mauve, actually) and it offers hearty felicitations to the new king. There is an itemised record of each royal family member who was dead at arrival at the King Birendra hospital.

The manner of the Web recounting is both bizarre and tragic.

More Bachchan: Sony Max thinks we do not get enough of Amitabh Bachchan these days. It began on June 24, with an Amitabh Bachchan film festival which is expected to run till the third week of Septemeber. Every Friday at 9 p.m.

SEVANTI NINAN

E-mail the writer at sevantininan@vsnl.com

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