After the last two weeks, with men screaming at me for an apparent biased view on the domestic violence act, I am afraid to take up another “women’s issue”. So this week I will talk about as gender-neutral a thing as possible: staring at the television.

After work, after dinner, when the brain is just about to curdle, when you wish you could donate your heavy feet to someone else, it’s the time to switch on the telly and stare. It’s one of the best tranquillisers.

One of my aged aunts needs the television babble going on in the background as she goes to sleep — if it’s switched off, she wakes up with a start.

But there’s a way of staring (I think men do that better, but I will not get into that), especially if it’s a news channel you have switched on to with the news ticker crawling at the bottom. Otherwise it can be very disturbing.

I am haunted by what I saw the other night. On a news channel, they were beaming live a young girl’s attempt to create a world record of singing non-stop.

The teenager, from Indore, had apparently been singing without a break for over two days. She was singing old Lata Mangeshkar songs. Her voice was cracking and she looked bleary-eyed and it was past midnight and she was just a child, but the crowd of friends, relatives and “elders”, including a local BJP leader, would egg her on.

She would go on too — the record was only five songs, four songs, now three songs away — and she would sing a few lines of each song. It was happy reality TV.

Likhnewaale ne likh daale… sang the girl, aspiring to Lata’s nightingale high pitch and looking around and missing the high notes as well as the next few words, but it was working fine as I felt that comfortable numbness settling in on me, till my eyes fell on the ticker. The contrast was mesmerising.

Ram Jethmalani says that Jessica Lal’s murder had nothing to do with a man demanding a drink from her, said the advancing ticker.

Likhnewaale ne likh daale… — it was a beautiful old Eighties Laxmikant Pyarelal-Anand Bakshi number and the girl was given to repeating the first line — and the ticker said that a skirmish had broken out between Indian and Pakistani soldiers in a Jammu prison in Bhalwal.

Likhnewaale… this time the ticker said in Rajkot three youth were caught for smuggling a huge amount of illegal gold.

The girl had moved to the next song. Milo na tum to hum ghabraye milo to aankh churaye… But the ticker, a contumacious caterpillar that will not be shaken off, goes on: Another farmer commits suicide in Nasik. There’s a fire in Chembur, Mumbai. Two terrorists killed in Doda.

Humein kya ho gaya hai, humein kya ho gaya hai, sang the girl. The inexorable crawler said Babulal Marandi had won a by-election in Bihar and the sealing of shops was going on in New Delhi, but the Centre thinking of approaching the Supreme Court again.

There was also an announcement of testing Agni III next year, but here the ticker was cut short, and the screen erupted into “breaking news”: the girl had done it – she had sung 723 songs in 61 hours!

It was very schizophrenic. I wished I had two pairs of eyes — one for the top half of the screen; one for the bottom. Because this was true, and that was true too.

I turned to my mobile phone for comfort. It was the same story. The pop-up messages would not stop: the screen would light up (green) and the following legends would appear.

One message said “India to give terror evidence”. To whom, I thought, but it just disappeared and the next one flashed: “Which music director has never released an Indipop album?” Who, indeed?

Then again: “Centre to open all options on sealing.” And the next: “Like dislike: Watching movies on Friday night.” Only at 1.15 in the morning, my service provider bid me good bye after promising to be back soon.

I think in India, unity in diversity lies only on our TV and mobile screens.

chandrima@abpmail.com