Jeremy Paxman (left) and John Humphrys

Every year, when I hit London, I need to satisfy a whole set of cravings. I need to ingest certain foodstuffs and drinkstuffs that I’ve been missing in India; I need to hit the stationery shops and the newsagents to buy paper-based and ink-driven paraphernalia that would seem completely un-essential to most other people; I need to go and wander through Soho and along the South Bank to feel the city; at the riverside, I need to pop into the Tate Modern and the Film Centre for a much-missed breathing in of art and cinema-type air. At home, there are the pleasures of what I call the “least-worst television in the world” and, in the mornings, unquestionably the best radio service on the planet.

Of all my London vyasans, the radio costs the least, providing the biggest bang per buck. On the radio, Today, the morning news programme, with its mix of summary, feature and interview is the most satisfying. Of the news, the best bit is when a high-level politician or government official is grilled by John Humphrys or one of his colleagues.

The Brits have an old perversion and it is called a Big English Breakfast. In this conclave of artery-damming food, crouched low amidst the sausages, bacon, fried eggs and baked beans is something called a blood-pudding, which is in fact, a disc of dried animal blood mixed with other crisp innardly stuff. It is sinfully succulent and the best component, by far, of the whole array on the plate. John Humphrys’s morning interview is my aural blood-pudding, though its effects are the opposite of the actual thing: rather than adding dangerous gloop, that morning confrontation actually cleanses the bad cholesterol of helplessness and despair from the arteries of the soul.

To shamelessly switch lanes on the metaphor-highway, the Indian TV anchors we get, the ones trying to be hard and aggressive with politicians, just aren’t in the same league. Watching them is like quaffing Indian whisky while listening to Humphrys is like drinking the finest single malt — there is a huge complex punch in the smallest sip. There is a fine art to being direct and tenacious and these Angrez, Humphrys on the radio, and people like Jeremy Paxman and John Simpson on TV, have mastered it.

Merely to be in their thrall is too limiting; it’s well worth examining where the mastery comes from. The first thing is you notice is how the newspeople address the interviewee. There is no fawning, no heavy layer of unnecessary respect, none of the curlicued icings of mantri-ji, minister-sahab, and so on. Here, the models of formality in Britain play a huge part. For instance, in this culture, the use of the first name is not regarded as rude; this has been so for a long time and the pronouncing of a first name doesn’t come attached with an inaudible tu, tui, tum or tumi; driven by context, the address can be either familiar or formal. Equally, rather than unnecessary honorifics, a formal address often just involves using the whole name rather than the Mr or Ms which are regarded as formal to the point of being legalese. Next, the whole business of using ‘gentleman’ and ‘lady’ is now history; it’s good enough to say ‘man’ or ‘woman’ when you refer to someone on the street: a parent would say to her child, “Darling, you’re blocking the path, let the woman pass” with nobody taking any offence. Yes, there still remains in use the lamentable habit of addressing be-knighted people with the ‘Sir’ or ‘Lady’ or ‘Baroness’ attached, but that archaic tic can be forgiven in an arena that is otherwise robustly no-nonsense.

So, as you gulp your morning coffee, the radio allows you (and six million others) to hear a real dialogue between two equals. As you munch your toast, you can hear an interviewer take a proper bite off a minister, something like: “David Milliband, your statement in the House yesterday raises more questions than it answers. Can you tell us what exactly has changed since the departure of Tony Blair? Your Iraq policy is still a shambles isn’t it? Can you tell us when you will be getting the troops out?” In return, on radio or TV you can hear a politician being firm or testy when he’s interrupted: “No, Jeremy, wait! Let me finish my point!” Sometimes the exchange can reach absurdity with the self-same Jeremy (Paxman on BBC 2’s Newsnight) repeating a question 18 times when faced with obfuscation, and sometimes it can be short and sharp, as happened recently when one Gordon Brown defended himself on the radio with his favourite weapon — figures — and Humphrys came right back at him: “Prime Minister, you have given me some figures. Now let me give you some!...”

It’s not easy, there is solid homework involved, and a great, all-encompassing, presence of mind, but it is the tone, the mutually accepted agreement that a person with official responsibility does not and cannot sit on an invisible pedestal, that is the strongest and most refreshing part of it.

It’s not that our own newspeople don’t try, some even do very well on a few occasions, but mostly they are trapped in peculiarly desi notions of nazaakat, where the press is both ‘free’ and yet not at liberty to demand straight answers. Actually, the thing is, we are trapped in a dilemma. We have too much, an almost Pavlovian, respect for the institutions our politicians occupy, and sometimes for the politicians themselves, (some of whom gain that respect just by the dint of having been around a very long time: why otherwise would anyone doff their anchor microphone to the likes of Bal Thackeray, L.K. Advani and Arjun Singh?) and yet, deep inside, we actually detest them, hate them for what they’ve done and keep doing to our country and society, resent them for the unchecked power they wield. Therefore, our team of usual media suspects never climbs out of the swamp of contradictory imperatives, one set tugging them towards a default position of so-called ‘respect’ while the other mutates into an urge to claw ratings by being more crudely aggressive than the next anchor-hero. Neither works, of course, because the respectfulness is motored by an old, feudal gene that is fundamentally anti-democratic, and the urge to emulate the Humphryses-Paxmans is triggered not so much by a desire to put the powers that be in a genuine spotlight as to create temporary sensation in order to increase the eyeball count. So, the top politicians usually get let off, while the minnows, or the ones seen as currently vulnerable, get bullied, but with no real purpose.

All top-level British politicians know that as long as they are in politics they have no choice but to come back to that morning interview on Radio 4 or the fight-pit of Newsnight; the get-outs of presidential privilege, where George the Dumber refuses to attend press conferences when the going gets too hot, are simply not available, even to the most autocratic in Britain’s power hierarchy. In India, the story is still, sadly, different. Try imagining an interviewer asking the following questions: “Prime Minister, why after so many years in power have you failed to prosecute Narendra Modi and his administration for the Gujarat massacres?” or “Chief Minister, isn’t it true that your party cadre raped and murdered villagers in Nandigram? What have you done about bringing your own party members to justice?” and then try and imagine that prime minister or that chief minister ever returning to your programme. It just wouldn’t happen. The question would be regarded as offensive and an insult to the very position of prime or chief minister and other, more sycophantic channels would get all future sound-bites leaving you and your profit-seeking media organization out in the cold.

Oh that it weren’t so but, of all the things to which I have access when visiting England, there is only one I really want to pack in my bag and bring back and that is the cheerful cussedness of the indefatigable question-askers, the ones who provide me with my interruption fix.