Thursday, May 12, 2005

Tum Daal Daal, Mai Paat Paat

Well recently, I have been bitten by this equity bug courtesy my friends Saurabh Srivastava and Shivshankar Bajpai.

I have been well advised by them that one can actually make some money with the stocks because until now I was of the firm belief that the third fastest way to burn your hard earned money is to invest them in stock market. The fastest way is, of course, to burn it literally. The second fastest way ..ahem.. pardon me, is to hand over you credit/debit/ATM cards to your wife, girlfriend, whoever.

Enlightened, I decided to further enlighten myself and hooked on to following programs - SubahLaxmi of CNBC-TV18 and Bohni of NDTV Profit - to get more feel of the market. The beginning was good. There would be a well informed host, and one guest consultant from some leading brokering agency. Analysis and discussion would follow. Some distraught people's SOS were also entertained.

So far so good. Then it happened.

One fine morning I saw a familiar looking lady sharing the table with the host on SubahLaxmi. Now we have two hosts. To my shock, I realized that this girl use to previously (badly)anchor a shady program called Raat Baki in NDTV Hindi in a highly irritating voice. It is a daily half an hour capsule, weekdays, on Mumbai night life. All crass, no substance.

I wondered what she is doing here. I got my answer soon. She was there to bungle the whole gem-of-the show. Every now and then she would interrupt, either the guest, or the host. For those who are not aware, I may add here that CNBC TV18 has some ravishing hosts and analysts, but they are not there for their faces. They are terrific in the analysis and very good presenters.

Alas, this show was ruined. But wait till I tell you about NDTV Profit. When they came to know about this new entry in their rival channel, they decided to emulate. Lousy copycats, because their copy was even worse. The problem was very basic. The program is in Hindi, and the lady doesn't know the language.

Same bungling and interruption started. NDTV Profit already had this habit of showing non business headlines ditto copied from NDTV 24X7 and NDTV Hindi every now and then. These 'headlines', in fact, are stretched quite in detail reducing the actual time for the business related stuff. Pray, somebody please tell them that for the news we can watch other channels.

If this was not enough, they took a step ahead of CNBC TV18. The original presenter is gone from past two days and the lady is all by herself with guest. It is really hilariously frustrating to watch the show now. Hope he returns. As far as show is concerned, it is nipped in the bud, I would say.

And nipped in the bud are my stock investment dreams.
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