Given that I've spent what feels like an aeon reviewing news TV, I should at least be able to hazily predict how it would respond to a major breaking story. By which I don't mean an earthquake or a Lok Sabha vote; I mean the sort of thing TV producers fondly imagine real people talk about at dinner.

Imagine, for example, that a slightly disturbed person assaults an elderly cabinet minister during a walkabout at the New Delhi Municipal Corporation office. I have absolutely no idea how such an absurd story would play out exactly, but I have learnt how to make good guesses, now. With only slight exaggerations, this is what could happen.

First, someone would get video. Oddly enough, these days, if anyone is getting assaulted, there's always a camera crew. My guess is it would go first to that bastion of refined good taste, Aaj Tak, who would play it on a loop with the headline "Chaanta Laga" and Shankar-Ehsan-Loy's De ghuma ke in the background. The anchors will christen it Thappadgate.

Then news TV's finest reporters would be despatched to the scene of the Incident. Mostly, the reporters in question are perhaps six months out of Jamia, need to ask where and what the NDMC is, and will have nothing to say beyond reading out the PTI story, but it is important for news TV's self-image to feature people outside a building shouting at a camera. Teams will also be flown to Ralegan Siddhi, where our favourite Gandhian will dispense gnomic wisdom. Once he's said his bit  that slaps aren't as effective as a good flogging, say  Arvind Kejriwal issues an angry press release insisting

Elder Brother was misquoted. This will run as breaking news.

Meanwhile, panicked producers will be busy changing their earlier plans for that evening's prime-time discussions. With a sigh of relief, massively unimportant issues like nuclear power protests will be dumped, and the same guests asked to prepare to hold forth on Slaps Through The Ages. On NDTV's Politically Incorrect, Mani Shankar Aiyar will tell an audience of shell-shocked college kids that an oversupply of slaps is an inevitable consequence of economic reform, and also that to really deliver a slap convincingly, you need to have been in at least one

St Stephen's Shakespeare Society production. Swapan Dasgupta will urge the BJP to campaign on the legalisation of duelling, which was after all good enough for Warren Hastings, but which these pinkos outlawed because socialism assumes away the violent depths of the human soul.

Over at CNN-IBN, on India at 9, Rajdeep Sardesai will discuss Thappadgate threadbare, while desperately trying to convey, through an expression of fastidious distaste, that he'd rather be talking about Rahul Dravid. One hour later, on Face The Nation: India's Most Presented News Show, Sagarika Ghose will devote the entire programme to asking whether news TV should devote quite so much airtime to things it should not devote so much airtime to. (News TV is capable of theatrical self-criticism, but never of listening to itself.) Ghose will congratulate her channel on keeping the tone of debate elevated, and then urge her viewers to participate in an SMS vote on whether ministers are just asking to be slapped.

Meanwhile, on Times Now's News Hour, an entire corps of bright young things will have worked out how to somehow miraculously transform the day's news into The Question The Nation is Asking Tonight. Arnab Goswami will lean forward, his arms braced against his desk like he's trying to keep himself upright, and demand to know exactly whose fault this shocking incident, now a Times Now Exclusive, is. Unless they speak up right now on prime-time TV, the entire nation is going to bed without supper! He means it!

Rajiv Pratap Rudy, whose wit is less dazzling only than his kurtas, will point out to Goswami that 100 per cent fewer ministers were slapped under the NDA. Manish "Malaprop" Tewary will tell us that such brutalism means that our de generis society is totally without deferrent. Suhel Seth, unsure of the show's subject but vastly sure of his ability to say something anyway, will suggest that his dear friend Ratan Tata be appointed head of ITC now that he's at a loose end. Kiran Bedi will warn that an army of angry slappers with big red Styrofoam hands and Gandhi topis will be unleashed on Parliament unless it passes the Jan Lokpal bill by 2 am.

The next day, on a hastily cobbled-together We The People, Barkha Dutt will ask the very divisive question "Does the Indian middle class get vicarious thrills from violence?" Everyone will say yes, at great length  except for Gurcharan Das, who would presumably worry that his agreeing that the middle class is a little too unshackled means his Libertarian card will be taken away and he'd be locked in Libertarian prison. Chandan Mitra will insist it isn't violent enough, after all we live in a violent neighbourhood, you secularvadi wimps.

And DD-News will have a two-hour report on Cambodian bore-well systems, followed by a

three-hour discussion led by that well-known expert on Cambodia, wells, and the boring, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta.

Naturally, these are just guesses. Were such a news event ever actually to occur, I leave detecting any parallels to actual shows, statements or personalities as an exercise to the reader.

mihir.sharma@expressindia.com

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