Next only to the Gulf War and the Kargil conflict, the hijacking of Indian Airlines' IC 814 has become every satellite network's infotainment dream. The region's 24-hour cable news channels stole audiences away from Bollywood films (absurdly being telecast simultaneously on Doordarshan and Nepal TV as the crisis unfolded). You had a choice of watching news as it endlessly tracked the plane hopscotching from Kathmandu, Amritsar, Lahore, Dubai to Kandahar, or you could watch a Bollywood re-run.
The voracious appetite of round-the-clock television news brought the drama into our drawing rooms, seemingly in real time. This meant that every speculative lead had to be pursued, every rumour had to be aired. Description of the trauma of hostages was punctuated by commercial breaks for saris.
The critical line between news and enter-tainment was once more blurred as it had during Kargil war and the Belgrade bombing. The technological leaps of the information age allow us to hop back and forth between real violence and reel violence, making it difficult to tell the difference between the two. They are separated by station breaks, or the flick of a remote.
TV privileges the live event. And against the backdrop of "live" footage numbingly repeated, rumour is upgraded to fact, prejudice replaces reasoned judgement, and half-baked analyses of dangerous hawks drive formal policy positions.