The world's a rotten place!

TELLY VISION

Over the past few weeks, my telly has shown me the faces of fanatics, hypocrites, maniacs, zealots, warped and senseless celebrities with the okay-I'll-never-kill-a-buck-again-but-fellas-I-escaped-this-time smirk, heartless, mindless and unscrupulous people.

Those who think (as I gathered from what I saw on CNN-IBN) that the pride of Orissa rests on the shoulders of a four-year-old boy running 65 km nonstop for over seven hours in a sweltering 40º C. Buffoons all.

Then there is a species that believes in burning people alive in the name of temples and mosques. One mosque burnt equals 10 people burnt; one temple burnt is equivalent to a similar number or more, who knows, and frankly, going by the way people are killed mercilessly I wonder if anyone really cares. So you have the Taliban beheading innocents, Lashkar-e-Taiba blindly gunning down over 30 villagers in the dark.

And yes, then there is another rotten species, the I-was-born-to-ruin-my-own-family variety who shoot their brothers because of an inferiority complex that developed when everyone else failed to knock some sense into their heads. Or young maniacs who visit their uncles and, on the sly, sneak their boyfriends into the house and steal huge amounts of cash from cupboards in the hope of living happily ever after.

On Star News' programme Sansani "" where the pony-tailed anchor obviously believes he needs to scream his lungs out because the world is deaf "" there was the story of a young girl who fleeced her own uncle in Noida and robbed him of Rs 20 lakh that flashed on the telly while we watched the girl shrugging her shoulders in response and saying, "Bas, ho gaya. (It just happened)."

While obviously no news channels make my telly jump in glee, thankfully telly has at least one reason to smile. By the time you read this column, Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahin will have already been buried under heaps and heaps of mindless commercials and a special episode to mark its end.

The makers of this serial have moved on to directing Jab Love Hua on Zee TV, a serial that, to be honest, has pathetic camerawork revealing the actors' jarring makeup.

Sony has shifted its focus to London in its new serial Aisa Des Hai Mera, a good plot with seasoned actors and a lead heroine who talks in a just-reached-Heathrow-airport-from-Jalandhar accent. Terrible, quite terrible. Also terrible is the guy who plays the patriarch's role in Thodi Khushi, Thodey Gham.

He looks like he has washed his face but ended up wiping his facial expressions off along with his face. Or it could be he left his facial expressions stuck to the mirror or something. He's so... what should we say, faded and whitewashed.

While Sony's patriarch in this new serial is trying hard to look serious, MTV's very own funny bone Cyrus Broacha on Youth Icon is interacting seriously with nominees including Abhijeet Sawant and Navjot Singh Sidhu.

His junior, Cyrus Sahukar, is the one who dons the funny mantle on shows like Semi Girebaal that, by the way, wasn't aired last Sunday. Hmmm, maybe the original Simi is in a mood to react and retaliate.

Attack of the Original on the Clones?

"" aojha@business-standard.com