The Gaga Newsreel

What is it about the Budget that drives the media to rapture, asks IBN7’s ever-contrary Sandeep Chaudhary, while NDTV India rolled out the annual ritual of asking people who don’t matter what they want and can’t possibly have. This is done on Budget day just before the finance minister’s speech, after which people who matter take over the airwaves and caterwaul unstoppably about what they haven’t got. But NDTV’s responses suggested that India is changing, for the better. While housewives wanted stable market prices as always, one of them thought of the kitchens of the poor. A visibly prosperous student supported education incentives, since the majority cannot afford higher education any more. Nice. Has the Me Generation taken VRS?

Meanwhile, Chaudhary stayed with the contrarian questions. Why is an accounting exercise so all-fired important? Is the idea of a decisive Budget day a media creation — economics as soap opera? Doesn’t policy evolve through the year? When most Indians don’t even know what the Sensex is, isn’t it just an opportunity to echo elite fears that all the bijli and paani is going to farmers for free? Aren’t farmers being told to sell to multinationals and buy branded goods? And anyway, why should diesel be sold at the same price for SUVs and tractors?

Speaking of tractors, Rs 100 crore has been allocated to DD Kisan, a brand new channel which will supply farmers with real-time information. That’s another exhumation from the Indira era, when Krishi Darshan dispensed Green Revolution technology to farmers and ennui to urban viewers. But enough of the Budget, whose core message has been missed by the entire commentariat: for Modi sarkar, Hindi and Sanskrit are great for oaths but when you mean business, please speak English.

Times Now sold the Budget like Marie Antoinette’s cake: “Everyone deserves a piece of the SuperBudget. Get yours.” Someone out there has been ODing on pie charts, maybe. Meanwhile, IBN7 ran a news story about some Delhi Police safety ads ahead of August 15. A pregnant woman in a cinema and a blind man in a train compartment try, unsuccessfully, to check under their seats, until other people ask what they’re looking for. Abandoned packages, they say, “it only takes a minute”. Nice work, a pleasant change from the scariest police slogan ever: “With you, for you, always.”

pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com