Television is bad for you

Now listen here. I'm an extremely busy man and can't be expected to come up with original material for blogs at the drop of a hat. Instead, here is a column I wrote for Time Out Mumbai a few issues back, in case you missed it (I'm talking to you, the one person who has visited this blog. I know who you are).

I hate being on television. Actually, that’s a lie. I like being on
television, even though my occasional minute reviewing films on CNBC gets drowned in a 24/7 parade of fellow TV nobodies. What I really hate is the process. The trick to looking good on television, apparently, is to talk to the camera like it’s a friend. In fact, you have to charm it. You have to smile at it, flirt with it and generally give it the impression that, if you weren’t so busy being on television, you’d like nothing better than to take it out for an intimate candlelit dinner and, who knows, maybe breakfast as well.

This is trickier than it sounds. The camera gazes at you from its tripod with a dark, jaded eye that has seen it all and is thoroughly bored with it. It is operated by an unshaven man with a thousand-yard stare who has already recorded 38 segments since morning and can no longer remember his own name. Off to the left stands a producer who, if you’re lucky, will still have some sort of grip on who he is and what he’s supposed to be doing, which is to restrain himself from bludgeoning you to death with the camera when you stumble over the word “abominable” for the seventeenth time, whilst mildly suggesting, “Why not try that again?” with the kind of grin usually worn by people who have been dead for about eighty years.

A recipe for sub-sexual flirty banter it is not. When that demonic red light winks on I feel like a necrophiliac trying to fake an orgasm. So it was actually pretty convenient that the last time I was supposed to be on television, somebody punched me in the face instead.

This was outside the Jehangir Art Gallery, that cauldron of unrestrained violence, as I was getting ready for another agonising bout in front of the camera. I desperately needed to fortify myself with a cigarette and noticed a slim, 50-something man in a neatly-pressed shirt leaning against the gallery wall with a box of matches in his hand. “Excuse me,” I said politely, “Could I have a light please?”

When something hard and painful smacked me in the face I didn’t immediately associate it with what I had assumed was a middle-aged art lover until he started raving: “Asking me for a match!? You standing there with your fancy cigarette” – true; it cost four rupees – “asking me for a match!? Get your own fucking matches!”

Despite this perfectly satisfactory explanation I couldn’t think of anything to say but, “What did you punch me in the face for?” which I repeated several times whilst holding my nose. The question seemed to confuse him. “Because that’s the way it is,” he said eventually, but he didn’t sound very certain. I considered punching him back but he was clearly so barking mad that it would have been like punching a tree because a coconut fell on your head. One of my co-workers found a neat solution by attacking him with an umbrella until he ran away.

I was feeling thoroughly miserable until it became clear that I could now hardly be expected to record a TV segment and was sent home with murmurs of sympathy instead.

Note to producer: can we adopt this as standard practice from now on? It really will be less painful.