It isn’t called the idiot box for nothing. Most of the fare available on television today is actually apt for those with the IQ of one. Topping these charts are the regressive saas-bahu sagas that emerge from the production houses of Ekta Kapoor and her ilk. May their TRPs fall into the fires of hell! A close second, almost biting at their sequinned sari pallus, are the pony-tailed, scraggy-bearded, strangely-coiffured gents in dark suits with a tendency to speak in loud whispers— the anchors of crime related programmes on so-called news channels. May the Vardaats and the Sansanis burn in hell as well!

Or better still, may their sets be infested with the false-eye lashed, artificially-bejewelled, emotionally-overcharged, conniving beauties of Kapoor and Co.

Left to the mercy and shenanigans of the above-mentioned, a couch potato with a mental age of anything over six years would be reduced to a quivering mass of jelly in a few weeks.

Here, we’d like to thank a few others (god bless their mothers) who help lazy, television watchers like yours truly retain their sanity and their faith in inactivity and television producers by dishing out entertaining, watchable fare that helps make those relaxed evenings in front of the television set a task to look forward to. Will National Geographic and Discovery Channel please take a bow!

Though the leopards of Discovery tearing apart a helpless gazelle may not be advisable dinner time viewing for the weak-hearted, at all other times you can rest assured that you will watch in rapt attention.
Vinod Dua’s Zayka India Ka on NDTV also makes for some fairly interesting, not to mention, mouth-watering fare as the portly journalist with the diamond ear stud loftily rolls down the by lanes of Purani Dilli or the ghats of Varanasi hunting for the original kheema samosa or the perfect sand-roasted ‘bati-chokha’ that comes with the hint of a garlic leaf and tangy tomato chutney.

You can actually feel the crispness of green dhaniya leaves as Dua bites into a kachori (even as his heart shudders) or the coarse coolness of the mud ‘kulhar’ in his hand as he takes a chai-ki-chuski from one. It is actually a taste to savour.

National Geographic is another channel that can hook you easily, provided you initially exercise the will power to stay away from the film-related programmes. If there is a child in the house, it is the perfect alternative to the dubbed cartoons flooding the kiddy channels.

This weekend my six-year-old son and I watched enthralled a programme on ‘Badly behaved animals’ where naughty-eyed raccoons were stealing food from a house, beavers had caused a farmhouse to flood and three smelly skunks were habitually making life un-breathable for a family in San Francisco.

Also included were the thieving monkeys of India and a persistent fuzzy furred squirrel that was lifting birdfeed by doing an intricate walk on a swinging clothes line. The bears of Colorado that were breaking into cars leaving nose marks on windows and garter snakes in Canada that were writhing their way into a basement school library in the lookout for some hibernation space joined the gang.

Entertaining, and informative when we were told that all these changes in animal behaviour were being brought about by man’s interference with the environment. What next, or rather next week? Well, I could click my tongue and join Dua on yet another culinary excursion to an earthy part of the country. Or, I could change channels to Nat Geo where ‘Naked Science’ will explore space to find out if aliens actually exist. Or, I could shift to Discovery just a few channels away and watch from my arm chair, a glass of bubby in hand, as man makes the first journey to Mars in ‘Race to Mars’.

In all these cases my loss would be the inability to find out if ‘Tulsi Virani’ is dead or alive after a car accident; whether ‘Baa’ has cancer or AIDS or is simply withering away in boredom from playing the same character for ten years and what are the blood curdling murders of the day. Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn!