ChinmayC Blog

  The technical committee of BARC (Broadcast Audience Research Council) has today suspended TRP (Television Rating Point) ratings for all English, Hindi and Regional news channels of India for 12 weeks or three months during which weekly ratings for individual news channels will not be published while the weekly ratings by language and state would continue. The period of suspension, as reports say, would be fully utilized by BARC to completely review and re-haul its sets of rules for calculating the TRP numbers, and thus would try to make the statistics of the biggest television rating agency of the world credible and trustworthy. Up to this point the rules were based on the viewing patterns of a sample of 40 thousand households or 180,000 viewers across the country through installation of people’s meter device in their TV sets, to determine the standards and patterns of nearly 200 million television viewing households or around 836 million viewers in India. President of the News ...

  After getting over with IPL 2020 played to empty stadiums of Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah, and the rather loud virtual audios continuously fed in perhaps to enthuse television viewers, some of the true cricketing elements are catching our attention in all of their elegance or the lack of it. Last evening while watching the Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) Vs Chennai Super Kings (CSK) duel in Dubai, the passionate display of India captain and RCB captain Virat Kohli somehow reminded me of cricket’s living legend Sachin Tendulkar in his evergreen one-day international innings, famous as ‘desert storm’, against Australia in Sharjah under the Coca Cola triangular cup in 1998. The images of the two greats got somehow juxtaposed: Kohli, with his team in a precarious state batting first, running like a hare, desperate for every single run, diving and rolling over on the ground, his spectacular shots all around the park in the most visible display of controlled aggression to his cruci...

  Yes, the title ‘ Ek Doctor Ki Maut ’ (Death of a Doctor) belonged to an award-winning Hindi movie made in 1990 by well-known filmmaker Tapan Sinha (1924- 2009). In the movie the protagonist, a medical doctor played brilliantly by Pankaj Kapoor, makes a rare discovery of a vaccine for leprosy after years of painstaking research, and instead of being recognized for that he is harassed and hounded by the authorities, and the doctor gets deprived of international honour also as he was transferred to a remote village. We cannot dismiss this story as a mere work of fiction, because the movie was based on the real-life story of Dr. Subhash Mukhopadhyay (1931-1981) who became only the second doctor of the world to use in-vitro fertilization in childbirth. Again, instead of honouring him the then West Bengal government and the Indian Government harassed him thanks to the familiar factors of professional jealousy, manipulative politics and bureaucratic negligence making the doctor face ost...