I am a combination of three different personalities and, therefore, not easy to please. You’d better believe this as I have an endorsement from Specky, my wife… and she isn’t someone who will air an opinion just for a pat on her back or a few wolf-whistles. She told me once, ‘You have an imagination that outruns the sort Ekta Kapoor has, the courage of those starring in thrillers, and the funny bone of our news anchors.’ I looked at her silently weighing what she had actually said and then laughed, ‘You mean I am a combo of a wishbone, a backbone, and a funny bone… right?’

‘Yeah! You’re right,’ she said, and the discussion came to an end.

Now let me just say that this is the sort of combo that makes me restless at times. You see, we have a rule at home to not switch ON the telly during daytime… and so this also means that the couple of hours we have in the evening before we hit the sack, tends to be a medley of ‘You watch this channel every day and it is boring. I insist that we change the channel’, ‘Not this channel again. Come on, this guy does nothing but yell!’, or ‘This movie is not worth being a couch-potato yaar…’ The truth is that what happens in our home isn’t much different from what happens in other homes. What do we call this? We call this our evening dose of entertainment.

We also willingly submit ourselves to another eclectic dose of entertainment by tuning to different news channels… sometimes multiple news channels in a single evening. Believe me this can make you laugh more than Kapil Sharma and his Comedy Nights or Bharti and her antics or even the utterly ridiculous vamps on TV soaps.

A friend once asked, ‘News is your media of entertainment. Right?’ And when the two of us nodded our head in the affirmative, he almost cried. ‘What will happen to our TV stars, bro?’ he asked. I told him calmly that the TV Moguls might sooner or later think about the benefits of job rotation and start offering these soap stars the job of news anchors. After all, there is, in reality so little difference between the two now.

Yes, of course news gives us the maximum entertainment… and I don’t mean just the chest beating of a guy called Goswami who thinks he is some sort of a small screen Tarzan out to intimidate even the tigers and the lions of our parliament. You’ll have to admit though that he does end up making these tigers and lions bleat like helpless goats. Now if this isn’t the climax of entertainment, then what is? Hear Abhisar persisting on ABP and you’ll know that entertainment has seeped into our personalities who want to desperately pretend that they are serious about governance. Hear the comic interpretations of Ravish on AajTak and you’ll stop patronising even the best stand-up comedians. I remember he was once talking about the environmental hazards of pollution and then suddenly, without letting a smile give it all away, he said, ‘There are jams everywhere. So many and for so long that I sometimes feel that a traffic jam get-together has become a possibility.’ I smiled when I heard this and thought this was the end. But he went on to say that people will come out and whatsapp or viber or message their friends to come to a certain crossing or road where the jam shows no sign of lifting… and maybe even call a DJ to add to the EQ there. I was rolling with laughter by this time… and even Specky agreed that spending time watching or listening to news on the television was far more entertaining than watching a serial or a movie.

So we have now found an ideal entertainment formula for the evening… mix NDTV, ABP, AajTak and a few other comparatively lesser known channels that dispense news and find enough material to send your friend ROFL-ing through your whatsapp messages!

Let me add here that some debates on these news channels are genetically comical and the one that takes the cake is where we have guests from Pakistan and the debate is on some contentious issue relating to our border disputes. History gets mauled, logic panics, politics is hauled and made to stand upside-down… as an evening of entertainment with generals and babus and netas gets on.

Then there are channels where news is converted into some sort of a thriller where only half sentences are revealed every few minutes or where the reporters have spent days avoiding talking about farmer suicides or the failing education system and have gone hoarse asking meaningless question to some baba or some homicidal wife of a CEO or keep showing us clips of policemen not behaving like policemen or netas asking babus to tie their laces or some such inane incidents. Well, the truth is that there are so many news channels that they are all under pressure to be different and this is precisely how entertaining interpretations emerge.

Therefore, the morning news that the sedate daily newspaper gives me is no match for the mountains of entertainment that the evening news on the telly is capable of.

So as the brilliant analysts have surmised, the newspapers are not going to die… but let me add here that the impromptu shows of entertainment of our news channels is also going to live on despite the onslaught of the internet.

The internet and the wifi, in fact, helps me fill my evening with entertaining shows. Come on, haven’t you heard of innovations like the #TataSkyTransfer and all that it is capable of doing?

Listen, I wrote in the beginning itself that there are times when I have to miss really entertaining shows because we do not switch on the television during daytime… or we are sometimes unable to decide on a common choice of channel. And if you think there is no entertainment during the days… let me just ask you to reach out for the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha channels or switch on the TV to listen to the presentation of budgets or impeachments or some debate that is publicised and you’ll know why the HD recording feature is great… and greater are those features that help you transfer recorded content to your mobile device or iPad or Tab and go to a corner during the evening to soak in your beauties of entertainment.

Now if this is exciting, let me add here that the new #TataSkyTransfer console allows you to stream recorded content and even view recorded content anytime, anywhere. This is unbeatable but if you are wondering how you’d store all these clips and programs, well, the console comes ready with a 500 GB HDD.

The recording is done with 16:9 aspect ratio intact and with a 1080i resolution to let you get the full value for money. Then there is the ubiquitous VoD or video on demand to applaud. Features like Rewind-Forward-Pause and a Dolby Digital quality is what is there. I guess the #TataSkyTransfer helps me be a wishbone, a backbone, and a funny bone together because it enables me watch everything that tickles my imagination without worrying about what I might end up missing.

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#TATASkyTransfer helps in keeping entertainment alive!

#TATASkyTransfer helps in keeping entertainment alive!

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Arvind Passey
30 September 2015