So, Saharashrijee is alive and exercising. Yet, the tongues are still wagging and some are even seeing in it shades of a Bollywood-style remake of The Prisoner of Zenda! ?He didn?t look himself at all,? said people who saw the Sahara supremo, Subrata Roy, on television last Friday after a gap of several months. His trademark swagger, it seems, was wholly missing.

It was not, after all, a live telecast. The sightings on TV were based on a video capsule supplied to various channels by the Sahara group to shut up critics who were drafting their Founder and Managing Worker?s obituary. It ended up like dating the bin Laden videotapes on al-Jazeera.

In this case though there was backup evidence: an ?exclusive? interview and photographs splashed across the front page of Friday?s Times of India. The Times men had met the Sahara boss in his estate outside Lucknow just last week. But doubting Thomases still wondered. ?He didn?t look as fit on TV as he did in the newspaper,? they said.

It wasn?t just the pictures. The interview didn?t tell us a thing we didn?t know already. Forget new information, it did not even explain why something as common as fluctuating blood pressure should turn someone who, it was once said, ?pathologically needs to be in the public eye? into a hermit.

The Times editors did not even ask him why he could speak to them from ?7.30 in the evening till almost midnight? on Wednesday, but could not make his customary birthday appearance before his Sahara India Parivar two days later.

In fact, there were no tough questions at all, only what the Sahara supremo would like the world to know. A dutiful Sahara Samay scribe wouldn?t have done it any different.

To expect more from the media though is futile. No one would cross a major advertiser, not even if it affects the lives of hundreds of thousands. We had to wait for the Ambanis to spill the beans on the Ambanis. Maybe the Roys will one day be as obliging.

Grim tales

Satinder Bindra loves his job. It is evident every time you see him on the CNN screen, all bouncy and eager to share whatever information he has been able to glean with the viewer. It is equally evident in his book, Tsunami: 7 Hours That Shook the World, obviously published to time with the 6-month remembrances of that fateful day last December 26. ?As a journalist, I remain committed to this story and will soon travel to the region again with my team,? he writes in the preface.

Such enthusiasm is remarkable, not just in the face of the grim tales that surely await him but because reporting for television, especially reporting live, is such a complicated exercise. Technology rules. Bindra?s emergency gear, what he travels with even on holiday, includes ?computer, cables, a satellite modem, a car phone charger and several spare batteries for my cell phone?. And even then, you are just a voice until your team gets there.

It?s exhausting just to read about the trials a TV crew has to go through simply to get to the spot with all their mounds of stuff. It?s admirable they can still think after that.

Who?s the victim?

There is every reason for the media to treat Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi with kid gloves. He is no gutkawala like Rasiklal Dhariwal or bhujiawala like Prabhu Shankar Agarwal. He is modern-day royalty ? by birth, profession and marriage. Above all, he is a middleclass hero who can sell us suit lengths and potato chips even with a thrusting beer-belly. Still, from the way the media have been behaving, coyly tucking inside even the news of his dressing down by the court, one wonders who the victim is, the ?Nawab? or the endangered black buck?