How will you feel if you are badgered every night at prime time by a curly-haired, screechy-voiced, over-excited anchor who can give SRK a complex with her repertoire of facial contortions? If you are like me, you will be compelled to watch her mouth inanity after inanity about Bollywood and you will not touch the remote even if she insists that she will be back after a cccouple of minutes (see, I told you she is like SRK). This, after an exaggerated upping of over-plucked eyebrows and a sudden smug smile. Mandy, as she calls herself, is really a one-of-a-kind anchor and I would say, as much a selling point of Headlines Today as the ever-grinning Prabhu Chawla is for Aaj Tak. She routinely stumps celebrity guests on the show (who usually wear a half-amused, half-embarrassed look) with her full-on accent and butterfly hand movements.

What she has in common though, with her ilk, is sheer ability to mumble and fumble through unidiomatic English, bad sentence constructions, terrible dress sense, and very little story, without a flicker of embarrassment showing on screen.

If Indian television programming has kind of lost its way today, don’t look at anchors for redemption. There are exceptions like Mr Dependable Prannoy Roy (whose calm charm has survived several elections and still impresses his guests enough to reveal stuff that they would rather not) and Mr Forthright Rajdeep Sardesai (though he tends to shout a lot), most are quite inept when it comes to anchoring a show in the true sense of the word — give it stability, hold it together and steer it in the right direction.

News anchors, especially in regional channels, routinely screech questions that would embarrass the staunchest defenders of  broadcast journalism. (When Sanjay Dutt went back to jail, an anchor of a Hindi news channel screamed down the phone at Sanjay’s America-based daughter, demanding to know how she was feeling at the moment).

Another time, two anchors discussed heatedly whether Manyata was married to Sanju baba or not (this after, umpteen clips of Manyata sitting on Sanju’s right side during a pooja). Save us!

NDTV’s sports anchor Sonali Chander, a picture of sobriety, is like music amidst cacophony. Especially as that aberration on television Navjot Singh Sidhu (colour-co-ordinated turban and all) is routinely hogging telecast time on her show.

But sobriety too cannot be overdone which is what Arnab Goswami tends to do. His questions get long-winded which forces him to interrupt (for lack of time) when his guest is trying to answer and we are in yawndom very soon. Let’s not talk about the much-feted and yet much-hated Karan Thapar. The poor man is assailed quite often as it is by his angry guests!

Then there are the ones I call ‘bouncy’ anchors. And I mean that as a compliment. These are a breed that are perennially excited but manage to not get screechy; they are usually better dressed than the rest and most importantly, manage to hold the audience interest either with some amount of wit or charm. Hussain (of Kumkum fame) should get a mention here. He usually manages to win over the audience with wide, eye-reaching smiles and good intonation but my advice to him is to leave the wife alone. Charmless and with an awful sartorial sense, Hussain’s wife Tina is quite simply not cut out for anchoring. Aditya Narayan and Shaan are two others in this category though Aditya tends to go overboard with his shuddh bhasha and Shaan appears to try a little too hard.

Finally, there are Zoom TV’s anchors. They are quite simply put, out of this world. All of them talk in a strange mixture of slangy English and accented Hindi; all of them are attired in weird clothes; and all of them look uncomfortable.

Even the normally pretty Shruti Seth appeared on Zoom last week in what can be loosely described as a grey smock held together by a canary yellow belt, cellulite-ridden thighs and black knee-length boots.

Zoom away please.