I am a happy man these days, or at least as happy as anyone can be in this Ram Rajya, where even 1,600 CCTVs and 400 security guards could not prevent His abode from being looted by His own bhakts.

To be clear, however, I am not happy because Mr Pradhan has resigned as education minister (he has not), or because Mr Modi has returned his AI-generated award from Seychelles (he will not), or because Kangana Ranaut has taken a vow of silence for one year (she cannot). All these are worthy objectives, but the personae involved are genetically incapable of attaining them.

So why am I in this happy frame of mind?

I am happy, dear reader, because I can once again watch television at prime time, something I had given up doing because news is no longer worth a straw (more on that later). But now that we have a veritable banquet of sport laid out before us — the Women's T20 World Cup, India's T20 tour of England, the FIFA World Cup and Wimbledon — my prime time is fully catered for, God's in his heaven, and Arnab Goswami, Navika Kumar, Padmaja Joshi et al. can go take a dump in the Ghazipur landfill or the Mithi river, for all I care.

There was a time, about a decade ago, when news channels like NDTV, Times Now and India Today did a fairly good job of covering domestic news, and one looked forward to the nightly primetime bulletin.

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Now, however, these channels have become pathetic caricatures of journalism. What they share with us are paid views, not news. Their views are dictated by their corporate owners and the PMO, not by public interest. Their undisguised agenda is to praise the government........

© National Herald