Two Minutes of Silence

If you were watching TV on Friday, Saturday or Sunday evening, you might have noticed a two minute break in transmission, no matter which channel you were on. And, in that break, you would have watched an ad where you were exhorted to buy a set top box and give away lots of your money to already-rich people.

It was almost like an ad, one that was shown at the same time on every channel. Only, we were told that it was a public service notification, so of course it must be all right. But maybe a short blackout across channels isn't such a bad thing. After all, there's lots of stuff on Indian TV that we would like a break from, and we aren't talking ads, either. Here are just a few examples:

1. Keeping Up with the Kardashians: Thirty minutes of fashion, cleavage, and sex is like, so totally awesome, but we just HAVE to take a breather to reply to our multiple pending BBMs and retouch our make-up. Oh, and to think up more names that start with the letter 'K' apart from Kim, Kourtney, Khloe, Kendall, Kylie, and Kris...damn, this is going to take more than two minutes.

2. Emotional Atyachaar: Adultery is so kewl! After listening to 19 minutes of accusations, 17 minutes of advertisements, and 24 minutes of bleeping, even the most patient of us would need to observe a few minutes of silence to mourn the loss of intelligent content. We WOULD, you @$$^%73.

3. Balika Vadhu: So Anandi was born. Then she got married. Then she turned eighteen. And magically became hot. It has completed a thousand episodes and runs in Serbia (since you ask, yes, in Serbian). Four years down the line, Dadisa needs a break from all the cursing. And the kids need to find good husbands. They're almost thirteen, for god's sake!

4. Grey's Anatomy ads: I think we'd all agree that it has been drilled into our heads enough that Meredith is just like us, dealing with life's tough questions. It's cool, we won't rat out on our best friends or sing our sad life problems into mikes. Two minutes of absolute nothingness on Star World would be better than ODing further on Ellen Pompeo's pained expression.

5. Breaking news, after it's well and truly broken: We appreciate news channels showing us 'exclusive' footage of grand and momentous incidents. We sometimes wonder how it manages to be two seconds long and extremely blurred, but we are happy. But then we see it 432 times, and it is shoved down our throats till the next day, when the news is old enough to get married. We need a blackout on all breaking news footage that repeats more than three times. Except for India TV - they pioneered the art of looping a millisecond of footage so many times that it filled up entire days of TV, and are hence exempt from this ban.

6. Ravi Shastri: Some have said that Mr. Shastri uses too many cliches to be considered a good commentator, but I disagree. For me, he lives equality through his every utterance: when he says 'Gayle is a tall man', he is echoing the thought of the viewer with the meanest intelligence, for he, too, would appreciate this fact. So, if all channels agree to bleep out RS' voice whenever it points out the painfully obvious, they will reduce BP levels across India by over 5%.