About this time last year I already wanted to quit NewsX, barely

A network started by Peter Mukerjea for chrissakes! He headed STAR TV! The news channel would be headed by Vir Sanghvi! One of the few Indian journalists I knew off, he wrote and spoke extremely well and I respected him immensely. These were excellent credentials to me and despite it being a news channel I signed up because I thought I would get to make some great programming and I would learn a whole lot from the Brits that Peter brought in to get the channel off the ground. The same Brits who hired me as a Producer for the channel.

I’ll be the first to admit I’ve made a boat-load of mistakes in my life but NewsX has to be among the biggest. Where do I even begin?

The Brits.

Only thinly-veiled racist twats. Trying to teach the basics of camera, editing, scripting and the basic elements of television itself to people who had been doing it for years and a lot of who had spent years in film school and could teach the Brits a thing or two about television. It wasn’t just that everyone was forced to undergo the training which was questionable enough but the sheer condescending, supercilious, stuck-up and often just plain rude manner in which some of the Brits conducted themselves was just plain horrifying.

One of our ‘trainers’, I later found out was a SECRETARY! A plain vanilla, file this, make me coffee, hold the phone, SECRETARY from Britain who was only here because she was Andrew Barron’s (the Brit Head of Programming)  girlfriend! Jesus-fuckin-Christ!

To be fair not all of them were total twats but everyone in NewsX was glad to see them go. What a fucking waste of money and everyone’s time they were but the wastage was only just beginning.

The Equipment

Sony XDR-EX1′s, the cameras NewsX leased. The most cutting edge, highly capable and future ready camera in it’s category on the market at the time. It could do a full 1080p, recorded on the Sony’s new side by side card which was a 3/4 express card (an equally new and promising format, no real time captures, just stick the card into a MacBook Pro or an adapter and dump ALL its footage in a couple of minutes) a non-servo mode focus ring so you could pull focus and just the most well thought out fully featured compact video camera I had ever seen.

To someone who had shot endlessly on a PD-150/170 and spent hours capturing footage and wrung his hair out in frustration at shortcomings of the little Sony (much as I loved it) NewsX’s new camera’s were brilliant. A little choir played in my head the first time I got one in my hands.

But then, the madness, NewsX was not only NOT going to be transmitted in HD but they were also in 4:3 NOT 16:9 which is the aspect ratio for HD. So, the day they decided to switch up to HD not only would they have to switch definition but ALSO aspect ratio. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! It just boggles my mind and makes my head hurt to think about it,even now.

Oh and BTW all of this AFTER leasing ludicrously expensive (I’m sure), cutting edge cameras (NewsX was one of Sony’s first customers) THAT ONLY SHOT IN FUCKING HI-DEF! So you would go out and shoot in HiDef but then come back and down-convert the footage to StandardDef and throw the original away. So the advantage of having these cameras? The huge HD footage archive you could have built up in a few years ? GONE!

The Management

I don’t know who the technical heads at NewsX were/are but they obviously had/have no clue.

Actually I do know who they are. During a shoot for the film about the start-up I once had to shoot a highest level board meeting in the basement of the NewsX building in Noida, this February or March, to show to NewsX’s investors.

In the meeting were Peter and Indrani Mukerjea, Vir Sanghvi, Avirook Sen and a whole lot of department heads. Among the many things the tech people pulled right outta their ass and told the Mukerjeas was the hilarious porkie-pie that you could monitor what a person was watching on a Tata Sky or a Dish set-top box. HOW? Its a one-way signal! TV station to satellite to the dish outside your house to the television. How does any information about what you are watching get transmitted back?

Those tech people couldn’t tell their ass-hole from their elbow without a torch and written instructions, preferably illustrated.

Anyway the meeting went so badly and it quickly became so painfully apparent that absolutely no one in the room had any clue about a direction or a future for NewsX that I didn’t shoot a single frame of footage. At one point Indrani Mukerjea remarked ‘Why don’t we just shut down the channel?”

My face must have betrayed my horror because Avirook Sen looked up at me and suggested I step outside and they would call me back when they had something to talk about that was suitable for viewing by the investors. So I sat outside the glass office for what seemed like hours and twiddled my thumbs while having a nice little panic attack about what was going on inside the board room. I was never called back in. There was nothing to shoot.

The Remaining Brits

The few remaining Brits who were supposed to set the format for the channel (or some such shit to that effect) spent months getting pilot after pilot shot and then shot down. They tried to graft every idea they had tried in the UK for a show in the last 20 years onto an Indian show not realising that this is India, not the United Kingdom and we aren’t the Queen’s subjects thankyouverymuch.

Not only did they waste time but tons of money. I once wanted (for a show)  a spy camera that cost under 10K INR in Delhi but it was decided that Andrew Barron would buy it in the UK. For 66K INR! And he did. And it was the wrong type of camera! And we would have needed another 6K INR of equipment to get it to function properly. So the few times I used that camera on shoot (twice) I had to record the anchor’s piece to camera’s on my goddamn cellphone.

Politics

The first whiff of this was when I joined the channel and quickly realised that there were people with no television experience or training whatsoever had been hired at the same position (and sometimes at higher salaries) as I.

Lets be really honest. Everyone played the game, some just played dirtier than the others. The Brits, the Indians, Peter’s people and Vir’s people and in the end Vir’s people lost and lost bad. I had never seen an organisation where people are fired on the spot and then physically thrown out of the building by security in the presence of gleeful department heads (Karun Thakur, whom I later caught in the basement edit labs doing some shit to the security camera footage from that fateful night) but sadly that is what happened. All of Vir’s people (many of whom I had/have utmost respect for and was crushed to see leaving) trickled out sooner or later.

Karan Thapar (is that his name?) was rumoured to replace Vir but as little as I knew about any of these people, I knew he wouldn’t touch NewsX with a long barge pole after what had just happened.

Enter Arup Whatshisface and his entire coterie of country bumpkin, tobacco chewing, ex-hindi news channel cronies. How can a dude who can’t string more than two words of the English language together coherently, be part of the editorial team in an English news channel that aspires to be the Indian BBC?? (Indrani Mukerjea used to state this goal often and even in the early days I was slightly incredulous. Really Mrs Mukerjea? The BBC? Surely you jest?)

Throughout all of this the Brits surprisingly outlasted almost everyone (like roaches that survive nuclear war) despite adding absolutely no value whatsoever to the channel but their time did come and one day they finally slunk out of the office with very little fuss. Before he left, Andrew apparently ‘confided’ to one of my colleagues that ‘he wasn’t given the freedom to do anything’. I read that as ‘he wasn’t given the freedom to screw the pooch for another six months’.

Today friends (and I did make many there) tell me there is no money to run the canteen, there are no cabs to go on shoot and they are afraid they may not get next months pay.

My own pay was docked because the plucky Brits took off with my ALL my shoot tapes for the film I spent most of my time at NewsX making single handedly and told NewsX they hadn’t a clue. Even after personally speaking at great length with Mr. Mukerjea about the tapes and giving him a copy of the film that Andrew Barron had on his website THAT I HAD SHOT, NewsX docked a huge lump of my pay and had the nerve to tell me that I owed them money and they would pardon the cost of the content on the tapes but I would have to pay for the blanks.

Now rumour has it that someone is going to buy the channel, lock, stock and stinking barrel. Rumour has it that someone already has. So NewsX hasn’t lasted a single year and no one who started it has come out of it smelling of roses. Most sensible people (I’m guessing) will be wary of joining any organisation again on the basis of either Mr. Sanghvi (who bailed) or Peter or Indrani Mukerjea (who couldn’t manage her way out of a wet paper bag, recent puff piece by the New York Times Wall Street Journal notwithstanding)

If only a little voice had come to me when I first signed up with ScrewedX (as my friends who still work there refer to it) and whispered to me…

‘This is all gonna end in tears’

This is a follow-up to my previous post. Bombay. How I loved you.

Lets start with the ‘media industry’. A lot of people raised a huge stink about Barkha Dutt’s grating coverage of the events and the huge cock-up about whether the hostage situation at Nariman House was over or not. There is even a group on Facebook called ‘Get Barkha off air’ or some such crap.

Please. Get Barkha off air? She may look like a dog, sound like nails on a chalkboard and ask the most inane questions but people who say that she used to be great but has sold out, ought to get a clue. Also, part of essential reading for all students of journalism and mass communication, especially all the wannabe Barkha Dutts doing piece-to-cameras for news channels ought to be this book.

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media – Noam Chomsky

Newspapers are hardly any better. My paper of choice is ‘The Times of India’ which has always been like toilet paper but worse. (At least toilet paper is honest about what it is). It has been  a couple of weeks and ToI has done its bit by covering the clueless fashion frat lighting candles at Jantar-Mantar in Delhi and some self-important dweebs in Mumbai fighting with the cops for their right to demonstrate at the Gateway of India.

So ToI has gone back to its regular drivel. Yesterday there was a full page picture of some old douche-bag with an expensive hair-cut astride a Triumph Rocket. Though, to put that into perspective TOI is part of Bennett and Coleman, the company that brought you the epitome of a double-think, mind-fuck: The Advertorial

Some thoughts about the politicians.

1. Narendra Modi grand standing in front of the Oberoi. – Why didn’t we trade that murdering rat-bastard to the terrorists for some hostages?

2. Priyanka Gandhi telling the press that her mother, Indira Gandhi would have handled the hostage situation better. -  Please, just get over yourself and your clan. All of you.

3. Raj Thackeray and the Thackeray ilk in general skulking furtively during the whole episode – Why can’t you Thackerays be like this all the time?

4. Manmohan Singh’s speech. – Mr Singh. You disappoint me.

Another Facebook group that I have been invited to join (and have also ignored) is one called ‘Dedicate your profile picture to the Indian flag’. There are a myriad reasons why I think the idea is repulsive, jingoistic BS but a friend of mine has described her feelings about our national flag and national anthem better than I ever could. Read Namrata Siviya here.

So. Facebook groups, candles at the Jantar Mantar, demonstrations at the Gateway of India, this is the best the middle and upper classes can do (besides writing self important blog posts like the one you are reading.)

There is one part of me that hopes Delhi’s notoriously thuggish cops lathi-charge the pompous twats at the Jantar-Mantar and Mumbai’s cops push the demonstrators at the Gateway into the Arabian Sea (It can’t possibly get murkier can it ?)

But then, what is the proper response? How do normal people express their outrage at the events? How about a dignified silence? Would that be better? Would it be more respectful to every single person who died an utterly pointless death? (Including the terrorists)

I was at a concert a few days after the attacks and before it started everyone stood up and observed a minute’s silence for the people who had died. I may be very wrong but that respectful silence seemed like a much better idea than anything else I have seen in the weeks since.