He pointed out the irony of once having just one Doordarshan which had something for everyone and now not one of the 300 or more channels cater to those aching to catch an Oddissi recital by Sanjukta Panigrahi or the cloud parting vocals of Pandit Bhimsen Joshi. 

Why expect the impossible, just take the way cinema is packaged and served to us on the so called film channels. Who if anyone, is still watching Shanivar ki Raat, Amitabh Ke Saath? Really, is there anyone still upto running into Deewar for the sixtieth time on TV? A classic remains a classic till we beat it to death and everytime a channel announces a Bachchan or a Shah Rukh Khan fest, a sense of fatigue overwhelms the senses. How about a fest celebrating alternate cinema of the seventies? Or an extended laughathon featuring the comedies of Basu Chatterjee, Gulzar and Hrishikesh Mukherjee? Works of first time directors featuring films like Manorama Six Feet Under and Khosla Ka Ghosla? The best works of JP Dutta? A well-informed tribute to Vijay Anand’s cinema?       
NDTV promises to start a channel on world cinema soon, but it will be like going on a global tour without first discovering the Taj Mahal. In a country fond of making individuals bigger than the work they do, we forget often that there is more to Indian cinema than Amitabh Bachchan or Shah Rukh Khan, more to play back singing than Lata Mangeshkar and cricket does not just begin and end with Sachin Tendulkar.

For serious lovers of cinema, tuning into Sony Max or Zee Cinema is like being trapped in a radio jockey’s cubicle with the same songs being played day in and out. It is rare to suddenly stumble upon Gulzar’s Khushboo or JP Dutta’s Yateem or Mehboob Khan’s Aan or Vinod Pandey’s Ek Baar Phir or Basu Bhattacharya’s delicately nuanced Anubhav. Also, don’t we deserve to watch all genres from all eras of Hindi cinema rather than random picks which veer from Bachchan’s old hats to Chiranjeevi’s dubbed flops to Govinda’s unmentionables? And where can we find one channel where the best of regional cinema, be it Bengali or Malayalam or Tamil is showcased alongside plum foreign films and the most entertaining as well as the most sensitive films from Hindi cinema? Doordarshan did that once as we watched Ray, Adoor, Coppola, Hitchcock and Basu Bhattacharya coexist happily on one bandwidth though in different time zones. We watched the historicals of Sohrab Modi, adored the water colour palette of Bimal Roy, watched Sir Lawrence Olivier stamp his Hamlet with genius and even saw Chinese cinema with empathy.

There is no sense of order or sensitivity in the way  recycled films are shoved down our throat these days between endless stretches of commercials. And to think that once the Sunday film on DD came with just one break! No wonder, families planned their Sunday meals around the evening show then. Watching TV is a disjointed experience today and there is no delicious sense of anticipation building up to the denouement of Ab Tak Bachchan.