The I&B Ministry, from 2006 till July 14, 2009, issued 42 notices to various television channels (news and general entertainment) for airing violent and sexually explicit content. The maximum penalty awarded to a channel for airing content that violates the broadcasting laws is a ban of two months.

AXN channel was banned in India from 17.1.2007 to 28.2.2007 for telecasting a programme called World’s Sexiest Advertisements. Similarly, FTV was banned for two months after the order of 29.3.2007 for showing a programme called Midnight Hot.

Watch the interesting story of Manoj Kewalramani, who left a cushy job of a senior news producer with an English news channel, to travel the length and breadth of India and talk to the STARS of Loksabha Polls 2009 – “The Indian Electorate”.

A bunch of self-styled guardians force themselves in a posh city pub and thrash women in the name of upholding our much-maligned and much-abused traditional Indian moral values. The incident portends the ominous truth that these are grave times indeed.

A frenzied media went haywire in the aftermath of the ugly attack as social activists and ministers alike ranted against what they described as the ‘Talibanisation of India’.

Over the past two months, none of us has remained insulated from the public discourse that has ranged from faint-hearted defeatism accepting a rotting order to boisterous and repetitive calls seeking “action” and “change.”

These words, however, are deceptive devices; they invoke the images of a euphoric, bright destiny but fail to vanquish the darkness along the road that has to be endured.